long struggle as a mere wit-combat, a vast miscellany of humorous
productions in verse and prose. The newspapers of the Revolutionary
period are strewn with such productions,--satirical poems, long and
short, of nearly all degrees of merit and demerit, some of them gross
and obscene, some of them simply clownish and stupid, some absolutely
brutal in their partisan ferocity, some really clever--terse, polished,
and edged with wit.
For the eighth class, partly in prose, chiefly in verse, are brought
together the dramatic compositions of the period,--a class not
inconsiderable in number, in variety, in vigour, and thoroughly
representative both of the humour and of the tragic sentiment of the
period. Tentative and crude as are nearly all of these writings, they
are not unworthy of some slight attention, in the first place, as
giving the genesis of a department of American literature now become
considerable; but, chiefly, as reproducing the ideas, the passions, the
motives, and the moods of that stormful time in our history, with a
frankness, a liveliness, and an unshrinking realism not approached by
any other species of Revolutionary literature.
Finally, to the ninth class belong those prose narratives that sprang
out of the actual experiences of the Revolution, and that have embodied
such experiences in the several forms of personal diaries, military
journals, tales of adventure on land or sea, and especially records of
suffering in the military prisons. Besides these, there are several
elaborate contemporary histories of the Revolution.
Perhaps no aspect of the Revolutionary War has touched more powerfully
the imagination and sympathy of the American people, than that relating
to the sufferings borne by their own sailors and soldiers who chanced
to fall as prisoners into the hands of the enemy; and for many years
after the war, the bitterness which it brought into the hearts of
men was kept alive and was hardened into a perdurable race-tradition
through the tales which were told by the survivors of the British
prison-pens and especially of the British prison-ships.
II. THE PRINCIPAL WRITERS
_James Otis._--After his graduation at Harvard, at the age of eighteen,
James Otis spent a year and a half at home in the study of literature
and philosophy; then, devoting himself to the law, he had begun its
practice at Plymouth in 1748; after two years of residence there,
he had removed to Boston, and in spite of his youth, he had quickly
risen to the highest rank in his profession. Throughout his whole
career, he held to his early love of the Roman and Greek classics,
particularly of Homer; while in English his literary taste was equally
robust and wholesome. He was a powerful writer, and he wrote much;
but in the structure and form of what he wrote, there are few traces
of that enthusiasm for classical literature which we know him to
have possessed. Perhaps his nature was too harsh, too passionate and
ill-balanced, to yield to the culture even of a literary perfection
which he could fully recognise and enjoy in others. He was, above all
things, an orator; and his oratory was of the tempestuous kind--bold,
vehement, irregular, overpowering.
In July, 1764, he published his gravest and most moderate pamphlet,
_The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved_. Of all
his political writing, this is the most sedate. It has even a tone
of solemnity. Indeed, its moderation of tone, at the time, gave
considerable offence to some of his own associates. The pamphlet
was said to have satisfied nobody. Yet it gave food for thought to
everybody; and it is the one work of Otis on which rests his reputation
as a serious political thinker. The real object of Otis in this
powerful pamphlet was not to bring about a revolution, but to avert
one. But its actual effect was to furnish the starting-point for the
entire movement of revolutionary reasoning, by which some two millions
of people were to justify themselves in the years to come, as they
advanced along their rugged and stormy path toward independence. It
became for a time one of the legal text-books of the opponents of
the ministry; it was a law-arsenal, from which other combatants, on
that side, drew some of their best weapons. It expounded, with perfect
clearness, even if with some shrinking, the constitutional philosophy
of the whole subject; and it gave to the members of a conservative and
a law-respecting race a conservative and a lawful pretext for resisting
law, and for revolutionising the government.
_John Adams._--Among the most striking of the literary responses to the
news that, in disregard of all appeals from America, the Stamp Act had
become a law, was one by a writer of extraordinary vigour in argument,
of extraordinary affluence in invective, who chose to view the whole
problem as having logical and historical relations far more extensive
than had then been commonly supposed. This writer was John Adams, then
but thirty years old, a rising member of the bar of Massachusetts,
already known in that neighbourhood for his acuteness, fearlessness,
and restless energy as a thinker and for a certain truculent and
sarcastic splendour in his style of speech. To the very end of his long
life, even his most offhand writings, such as diaries and domestic
letters, reveal in him a trait of speculative activity and boldness.
With the exception of Jefferson, he is the most readable of the
statesmen of the Revolutionary period. A series of four essays by John
Adams, which were first published, though without his name and without
any descriptive title, in _The Boston Gazette_, in August, 1765, by
their wide range of allusion, their novelty, audacity, eloquence, by
the jocular savagery of their sarcasms on things sacred, easily and
quickly produced a stir, and won for themselves considerable notoriety.
In 1768, they were welded together into a single document, and as such
were published in London under the somewhat misleading title of _A
Dissertation on the Canon and the Federal Law_.
_Francis Hopkinson._--On September 5, 1774, forty-four respectable
gentlemen, representing twelve “colonies and provinces in North
America,” made their way into Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, and there
began “to consult upon the present state of the colonies.” Thus came
into life the first Continental Congress, and with it the permanent
political union of the American people. As they came out from that
hall, some of them may have found, on stepping into Mr. John Dunlap’s
shop not far away, a lively-looking little book--_A Pretty Story_--just
come from the printer’s hands, in which book, under the veil of playful
allegory, they could read in a few minutes a graphic and indeed a
quite tremendous history of the very events that had brought them
together in that place. Even a glance over this little book will show
that here at last was a writer, enlisted in the colonial cause, who
was able to defend that cause, and to assail its enemies, with a fine
and a very rare weapon--that of humour. The personages included in _A
Pretty Story_ are few; its topics are simple and palpable, and even
now in but little need of elucidation; the plot and incidents of the
fiction travel in the actual footsteps of well-known history; while
the aptness, the delicacy, and the humour of the allegory give to the
reader the most delightful surprises, and are well sustained to the
very end. Indeed, the wit of the author flashes light upon every legal
question then at issue; and the stern and even technical debate between
the colonies and the motherland is here translated into a piquant and a
bewitching novelette. It soon became known that its author was Francis
Hopkinson.
By this neat and telling bit of work, Hopkinson took his true place as
one of the three leading satirists on the Whig side of the American
Revolution,--the other two being John Trumbull and Philip Freneau. In
the long and passionate controversy in which these three satirists
bore so effective a part, each is distinguishable by his own peculiar
note. The political satire of Freneau and of Trumbull is, in general,
grim, bitter, vehement, unrelenting. Hopkinson’s satire is as keen as
theirs, but its characteristic note is one of playfulness. They stood
forth the wrathful critics and assailants of the enemy, confronting
him with a hot and an honest hatred, and ready to overwhelm him with
an acerbity that was fell and pitiless. Hopkinson, on the other hand,
was too gentle, too tender-hearted--his personal tone was too full of
amenity--for that sort of warfare. As a satirist, he accomplished his
effects without bitterness or violence. No one saw more vividly than he
what was weak, or despicable, or cruel, in the position and conduct of
the enemy; but in exhibiting it, his method was that of good-humoured
ridicule. Never losing his temper, almost never extreme in emotion or
in expression, with an urbanity which kept unfailingly upon his side
the sympathies of his readers, he knew how to dash and discomfit the
foe with a raillery that was all the more effective because it seemed
to spring from the very absurdity of the case, and to be, as Ben Jonson
required, “without malice or heat.”
Francis Hopkinson was born in Philadelphia in 1737. Even in these days,
he would have been regarded as a man of quite unusual cultivation,
having in reality many solid as well as shining accomplishments. He
was a distinguished practitioner of the law; he became an eminent
judge; he was a statesman trained by much study and experience; he was
a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor,
a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and
practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with
pencil and brush, and a humourist of unmistakable power. For us
Americans, the name of Francis Hopkinson lives--if indeed it does
live--chiefly on account of its presence in the august roll-call of the
signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was a devotee to the
law, who never took farewell of the Muses. And thus it came about that,
from the autumn of 1774 on until the very close of the long struggle,
the cause of the Revolution, at nearly every stage and emergency of it,
was rescued from depression, was quickened, was cheered forward, was
given strength, by the vivacity of this delightful writer.
For the development among the Americans in 1776 of the robust political
courage invoked by their new doctrine of national separation, it was
necessary that the amiable note of provincialism--the filial obtuseness
of the colonial mind--should be broken up, and that the Englishmen
who lived in America should begin to find food for mirth and even
for derision in the peculiarities of the Englishmen who lived in
England. Toward this important political result, Hopkinson made some
contribution in his so-called _Letter written by a Foreigner on the
Character of the English Nation_. Under an old device for securing
disinterested judgments on national peculiarities, Hopkinson here
represents a cultivated foreigner as spending some time in England in
the latter part of 1776, and as giving to a friend in his own country
a cool but very satirical analysis of the alleged vices, foibles, and
absurdities of the English people, and of the weak and wrong things
in their treatment of their late colonists in America. From these
character-sketches by the supposed foreigner in London in the year
1776--themselves by no means despicable for neat workmanship and for
humorous power--it is not difficult to make out just how Hopkinson’s
playful writings were adapted to the achievement of serious political
results, as ridding colonial-minded Americans of the intellectual
restraint imposed almost unconsciously by their old provincial awe
of England, and helping them to subject the metropolitan race to
caustic and even contemptuous handling, as a necessary condition of
national free-mindedness and of bold dissent on questions of political
authority and control.
The expedition of the year 1777, under the command of Sir William Howe,
resulted in considerable temporary disaster to the American cause.
Nevertheless, it was this very expedition, so full of prosperity for
the British, which in its sequel gave to Hopkinson the occasion for his
most successful stroke as a humorous writer. Sir William, having gained
a brief succession of victories, finding Philadelphia an agreeable
place of repose, concluded to settle himself down in that city. The
surrounding inhabitants, who had at first regarded him and his army
with no little terror, soon came to regard both with some derision, and
to conceive the idea of practising upon both certain experiments which
had in them an element of covert mirthfulness, as it were. By a very
imaginative and a very rollicking expansion of the actual facts of this
small affair, Hopkinson was enabled to compose his celebrated ballad,
_The Battle of the Kegs_. The actual facts of the case are as follows,
according to his own later testimony in prose: “Certain machines, in
the form of kegs, charged with gunpowder, were sent down the river
to annoy the British shipping at Philadelphia. The danger of these
machines being discovered, the British manned the wharfs and shipping,
and discharged their small arms and cannons at everything they saw
floating in the river during the ebb tide.” This jingling little story
of _The Battle of the Kegs_--mere doggerel though it is--flew from
colony to colony, and gave the weary and anxious people the luxury of
genuine and hearty laughter in very scorn of the enemy. To the cause
of the Revolution, it was perhaps worth as much, just then, by way
of emotional tonic and of military inspiration, as the winning of a
considerable battle would have been. From a literary point of view,
_The Battle of the Kegs_ is very far from being the best of Hopkinson’s
writings.
Nevertheless, for its matter and its manner and for the adaptation
of both to the immediate enjoyment of the multitude of readers, it
became in his own day the best known of all its author’s productions,
even as, since then, it is the only one that has retained any general
remembrance in our literature.
_Philip Freneau._--The work of Philip Freneau as poet and satirist
in direct contact with the American Revolution was broken into two
periods,--these periods being separated from each other by an interval
of about two years. The first period embraces those months of the
year 1775 wherein his own fierce passions, like the passions of his
countrymen, were set aflame by the outbreak of hostilities. Thereafter
occurred a mysterious lapse in his activity as a writer on themes
connected with the great struggle to which he had professed his undying
devotion;--he was absent from the country until some time in the year
1778. With the middle of the year 1778 began the second period of his
work as Revolutionary poet and satirist, and it did not come to an end,
except with the end of the Revolution itself.
After a considerate inspection of the writers and the writings of our
Revolutionary era, it is likely that most readers will be inclined to
name Philip Freneau as the one American poet of all that time who,
though fallen on evil days and driven from his true course somewhat by
stormy weather, yet had a high and questionless vocation for poetry.
Of his own claim to recognition he was proudly conscious. Nor was he
unconscious of all that was malign to his poetic destiny, both in the
time and in the place on which his lot was cast. Even in the larger
relations which an American poet in the eighteenth century might hold
to the development of English poetry everywhere, Freneau did some
work, both early and late, so fresh, so original, so unhackneyed, so
defiant of the traditions that then hampered and deadened English
verse, so delightful in its fearless appropriation of common things
for the divine service of poetry, as to entitle him to be called a
pioneer of the new poetic age that was then breaking upon the world,
and therefore to be classed with Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and their
mighty comrades,--those poetic iconoclasts who, entering the temple of
eighteenth-century English verse, broke up its wooden idols, rejected
its conventionalised diction, and silenced for ever its pompous,
monotonous, and insincere tune. Finally, of Freneau, it remains to be
said that, in a certain eminent sense, he was the first American poet
of Democracy; and that from the beginning to the end of his career,
and in spite of every form of temptation, he remained true--fiercely,
savagely true--to the conviction that his part and lot in the world
was to be a protagonist on behalf of mere human nature, as against
all its assailants whether in church or state. In the year 1795, this
combat-loving poet sent forth a second and an enlarged edition of his
poems, which had been first issued seven years before; and in some
verses which he therein inserted, entitled “To my Book,” one may still
hear the proud voice with which he claimed for himself that, whether
in other ways successful or not, he was at least a poet militant--ever
doing battle on the people’s side.
_John Trumbull._--John Trumbull, with an inward vocation for a life of
letters, turned away to a calling far more likely to supply him with
bread--the profession of the law. It was in November, 1773, that he
was admitted to the bar of Connecticut. Being then but twenty-three
years of age, he wrote in verse an eternal farewell to verse-making.
Notwithstanding all his vows of devotion to the new mistress whom he
was to serve, Trumbull could not forget his earlier love. Henceforward,
all his fine literary accomplishments, his subtlety, his wit, his gift
for ridicule, his training in satire, are to be at the service of the
popular cause, and are to produce in _M’Fingal_ one of the world’s
masterpieces in political badinage. The time of the poem is shortly
after April, 1775. The scene is laid in a certain unnamed New England
town, apparently not far from Boston. No literary production was ever
a more genuine embodiment of the spirit and life of a people, in the
midst of a stirring and world-famous conflict, than is _M’Fingal_ an
embodiment of the spirit and life of the American people, in the midst
of that stupendous conflict which formed our great epoch of national
deliverance. Here we find presented to us, with the vividness of a
contemporary experience, the very issues which then divided friends
and families and neighbourhood, as they did entire colonies, and at
last the empire itself; the very persons and passions of the opposing
parties; the very spirit and accent and method of political controversy
at that time; and at last, those riotous frolics and that hilarious
lawlessness with which the Revolutionary patriots were fond of
demonstrating their disapproval of the politics of their antagonists.
Satire is, of course, one of the less noble forms of literary
expression; and in satire uttering itself through burlesque, there
is special danger of the presence of qualities which are positively
ignoble. Yet never was satire employed in a better cause, or for
loftier objects, or in a more disinterested spirit. The author of
_M’Fingal_ wrote his satire under no personal or petty motive. His poem
was a terrific assault on men who, in his opinion, were the public
enemies of his country; and he did not delay that assault until they
were unable to strike back. _M’Fingal_ belongs, indeed, to a type of
literature hard, bitter, vengeful, often undignified; but the hardness
of _M’Fingal_, its bitterness, its vengeful force are directed against
persons believed by its author to be the foes--the fashionable and the
powerful foes--of human liberty; if at times it surrenders its own
dignity, it does so on behalf of the greater dignity of human nature.
That _M’Fingal_ is, in its own sphere, a masterpiece, that it has
within itself a sort of power never attaching to a mere imitation,
is shown by the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the
American people. Immediately upon its first publication, it perfectly
seized and held the attention of the public. It was everywhere read.
Probably as many as forty editions of it have been issued in this
country and in England. It was one of the forces which drove forward
that enormous movement of human thought and passion which we describe
as the American Revolution; and in each of the great agitations of
American thought and passion which have occurred since that time,
occasioned by the French Revolution, by the War of 1812, and by the
war which extinguished American slavery, this scorching satire against
social reaction, this jeering burlesque on political obstructiveness,
has been sent forth again and again into the world, to renew its
mirthful and scornful activity in the ever-renewing battle for human
progress.