immediate offspring of the baleful Stamp Act dispute, there stand
out, as of the highest significance, certain essays which began to
make their appearance in a Philadelphia newspaper in the latter part
of the year 1767. These essays very soon became celebrated, on both
sides of the Atlantic, under the short title of the _Farmer’s Letters_.
Their full title was _Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the
Inhabitants of the British Colonies_. Though published without the
author’s name, they were instantly recognised as the work of John
Dickinson; and their appearance may perhaps fairly be described as
constituting, upon the whole, the most brilliant event in the literary
history of the Revolution. One distinction attaching to them is that
they were written by a man who shared in the general excitement over
the new attack upon colonial rights, but who desired to compose it
rather than to increase it, and especially to persuade his countrymen
so to bear their part in the new dispute as to save their rights as
men, without losing their happiness as British subjects. Here was
a man of powerful and cultivated intellect, with all his interests
and all his tastes on the side of order, conservatism, and peace, if
only with these could be had political safety and honour. No other
serious political essays of the Revolutionary era quite equalled the
_Farmer’s Letters_ in literary merit, including in that term the merit
of substance as well as of form; and, excepting the political essays
of Thomas Paine, which did not begin to appear until nine years later,
none equalled the _Farmer’s Letters_ in immediate celebrity, and in
direct power upon events. As they first came forth, from week to week,
in the Philadelphia newspaper that originally published them, they
were welcomed by the delighted interest and sympathy of multitudes of
readers in that neighbourhood, and were instantly reproduced in all
the twenty-five newspapers then published in America, with but four
known exceptions. Within less than four weeks after the last letter had
made its appearance, they were all collected and issued as a pamphlet,
of which at least eight editions were published in different parts of
America. On both sides of the Atlantic, the _Farmer’s Letters_ gained
universal attention among the people interested in the rising American
dispute. The name of John Dickinson became a name of literary renown
surpassing that of any other American, excepting Benjamin Franklin.
On the continent of Europe, these essays of the Pennsylvania Farmer
became, for a time, the fashion: they were talked of in the salons of
Paris; the Farmer himself was likened to Cicero; and almost the highest
distinction then possible for any man was bestowed upon him through
the notice and applause of Voltaire. Even in England, the success
of these writings was remarkable, and was shown quite as much in the
censures as in the praises which were lavished upon them. Among the
English admirers of the _Farmer’s Letters_ was Edmund Burke, who gave
his sanction to their principle. In America, the admiration and the
gratitude of the people were expressed in almost every conceivable
form. Thanks were voted to the Farmer by political associations, by
town-meetings, by grand juries. The College of New Jersey conferred
on him the degree of Doctor of Laws. He became the favourite toast at
public banquets. He was offered the membership of the choicest social
clubs. On his entrance, one day, into a court-room, whither business
called him, the proceedings were stopped in order to recognise his
presence, and to make acknowledgment of the greatness and splendour of
his services to the country. Songs were written in his praise.
The last of the _Farmer’s Letters_ was published in February, 1768. In
the following May, the new commissioners of customs arrived at Boston;
in June, these commissioners, attempting to execute their odious office
on John Hancock’s sloop, _Liberty_, were fiercely assaulted by the
populace of Boston, and were driven for refuge to Castle William in
Boston Harbour; whereupon Governor Bernard summoned thither General
Gage with his troops from Halifax. Of these most ominous events in
Boston, John Dickinson was an observer from his distant home on the
Delaware; and even he, with all his deep loyalty and conscientious
hesitation, was so stirred by them as then to utter what seems
almost a ringing war-cry. Taking for his model Garrick’s _Hearts of
Oak_--the air of which was then so familiar to every one--he wrote the
stanzas which he christened _A Song for American Freedom_,--a bit of
versification obviously the work of a man neither born nor bred to that
business; yet being quickly caught up into universal favour under the
endearing name of the _Liberty Song_, its manly lines soon resounded
over all the land; and thenceforward, for several years, it remained
the most popular political song among us.
If we attempt to estimate the practical effects of John Dickinson’s
work as a political writer during the American Revolution, we shall
find it not easy to disentangle and to separate them from the practical
effects of his work as a politician. The two lines of power were
closely interwoven; each, in the main, helped the other, as each was
liable, in its turn, to be hindered by the other. At any rate, just
as the politico-literary influence of James Otis was, upon the whole,
predominant in America from 1764 until 1767, so, from the latter
date until some months after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775,
was the politico-literary influence of John Dickinson predominant
here. Moreover, as he succeeded to James Otis in the development of
Revolutionary thought, so was he, at last, succeeded by Thomas Paine,
who held sway among us, as the chief writer of political essays, from
the early part of 1776 until the close of the Revolution itself. The
prodigious decline in the influence of John Dickinson, at the approach
of the issue of independence, is a thing not hard to explain; it was
due in part to his personal characteristics, in part to the nature of
his opinions. From the beginning of the troubles until some months
after the first shedding of blood, in 1775, public opinion in America
had set strongly in favour of making demand--even armed demand--for our
political rights, but without any rupture of the colonial tie. It was,
therefore, a period calling for clear and resolute statements of our
claims, but with loyalty, urbanity, and tact. To be the chief literary
exponent of such a period, John Dickinson was in every way fitted by
talent, by temperament, by training. A man of wealth, cultivation, and
elegant surroundings, practically versed in the law and in politics,
considerate, cautious, disinclined to violent measures and to stormy
scenes, actuated by a passion for the unity and the greatness of the
English race and for peace among all men, it was his sincere desire
that the dispute with the mother country should be so conducted as to
end, at last, in the perfect establishment of American constitutional
rights within the empire, but without any hurt or dishonour to England,
and without any permanent failure in respect and kindness between her
and ourselves. Nevertheless, in 1775, events occurred which gave a
different aspect to the whole dispute, and swept an apparent majority
of the American people quite beyond the sphere of such ideas and
methods. John Dickinson’s concession to Parliament of a legislative
authority over us, even to a limited extent, was roughly discarded;
instead of which was enthroned among us the unhistoric and makeshift
doctrine that American allegiance was due not at all to Parliament, but
to the Crown only. Moreover, the moderation of tone, the urbane speech,
the civility in conduct, exemplified by Dickinson in all this dispute
with England, then became an anachronism and an offence. We were
plunged at last into civil war--we had actually reached the stage of
revolution; and the robust men who then ruled the scene were disposed,
with no little contempt, to brush aside the moderate, conservative,
and courteous Dickinson, who, either for advice or for conduct, seemed
to them to have no further function to perform in the American world.
His _Farmer’s Letters_ were declared by Jefferson to have been “really
an ‘ignis fatuus,’ misleading us from true principles.” Even Edward
Rutledge, who, in June, 1776, agreed with Dickinson in his opposition
to the plan for independence, nevertheless expressed some impatience
with his intellectual fastidiousness and nicety,--declaring that the
“vice of all his productions, to a considerable degree,” was “the vice
of refining too much.”
_Alexander Hamilton._--Within two or three weeks from the day on which
the Congress announced its grand scheme for an agreement among the
American colonists not to import or to consume the chief materials of
the English carrying-trade, nor to export the chief products of their
own farms, there came from the press of New York a pamphlet--_Free
Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress_--ostensibly
written by a farmer, and addressed to farmers, and from the level of
their particular interests subjecting the proposal of Congress to
a sort of criticism that was well fitted to arouse against it the
bitterest and most unrelenting opposition of the great agricultural
class. The writer of this pamphlet--Samuel Seabury, a Loyalist
clergyman--professed to be a “Westchester Farmer,”--a signature which
at once became the target for vast applause and for vast execration.
The first pamphlet was dated November 16, 1774. Twelve days from
that date came his second one--as keen, as fiery, as powerful as the
first. In less than four weeks from the day of his second pamphlet,
the undaunted farmer was ready with a third one. No sooner was this
pamphlet off his hands, than the “Westchester Farmer” seems to have set
to work upon his fourth pamphlet.
Among the throng of replies which burst forth from the press in
opposition to the tremendous pamphlets of the “Westchester Farmer,”
were two which immediately towered into chief prominence: _A Full
Vindication of the Measures of the Congress_, and _The Farmer Refuted_.
The extraordinary ability of these two pamphlets--their fulness in
constitutional learning, their acumen, their affluence in statement,
their cleverness in controversial repartee, their apparent wealth in
the fruits of an actual acquaintance with public business--led both the
“Westchester Farmer” and the public in general to attribute them to
some American writer of mature years and of ripe experience--to some
member of the late Congress, for example--particularly to John Jay or
to William Livingston. It is not easy to overstate the astonishment
and the incredulity with which the public soon heard the rumour that
these elaborate and shattering literary assaults on the argumentative
position of the Loyalists were, in reality, the work of a writer who
was then both a stripling in years and a stranger in the country--one
Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian by birth, a Franco-Scotsman by
parentage, an undergraduate of King’s College by occupation, a resident
within the Thirteen Colonies but little more than two years, and at the
time of the publication of his first pamphlet only seventeen years of
age. In the exposition of his views touching the several vast fields
of thought here brought under consideration,--constitutional law,
municipal law, the long line of colonial charters, colonial laws and
precedents, international polity as affecting the chief nations of
Christendom, justice in the abstract and justice in the concrete, human
rights both natural and conventional, the physical and metaphysical
conditions underlying the great conflict then impending,--it must be
confessed that this beardless philosopher, this statesman not yet out
of school, this military strategist scarcely rid of his roundabout,
exhibits a range and precision of knowledge, a ripeness of judgment, a
serenity, a justice, a massiveness both of thought and of style, which
would perhaps make incredible the theory of his authorship of these
pamphlets, were not this theory confirmed by his undoubted exhibition
in other ways, at about the same period of his life, of the same
astonishing qualities.
_Thomas Paine._--As the bitter events of 1775 rapidly unfolded
themselves, not a few Americans became convinced that there was no true
solution of the trouble except in that very independence which they
had but a short time before dreaded and denounced. Of such Americans,
Thomas Paine was one; and towards the end of the year, through
incessant communication with the foremost minds in America, he had
filled his own mind with the great decisive elements of the case, and
was prepared to utter his thought thereon. Early in January, 1776, he
did utter it, in the form of a pamphlet, published at Philadelphia,
and entitled _Common Sense_,--the first open and unqualified
argument in championship of the doctrine of American independence.
During the first ten or twelve years of the Revolution, in just one
sentiment all persons, Tories and Whigs, seemed perfectly to agree;
namely, in abhorrence of the project of separation from the empire.
Suddenly, however, and within a period of less than six months, the
majority of the Whigs turned completely around, and openly declared
for independence, which, before that time, they had so vehemently
repudiated. Among the facts necessary to enable us to account for this
almost unrivalled political somersault, is that of the appearance of
_Common Sense_. This pamphlet was happily named: it undertook to apply
common sense to a technical, complex, but most urgent and feverish,
problem of constitutional law. In fact, on any other ground than that
of common sense, the author of that pamphlet was incompetent to deal
with the problem at all; since of law, of political science, and
even of English and American history, he was ludicrously ignorant.
But for the effective treatment of any question whatsoever that was
capable of being dealt with under the light of the broad and rugged
intellectual instincts of mankind,--man’s natural sense of truth, of
congruity, of fair-play,--perhaps no other man in America, excepting
Franklin, was a match for this ill-taught, heady, and slashing English
stranger. From the tribunal of technical law, therefore, he carried
the case to the tribunal of common sense; and in his plea before
that tribunal, he never for a moment missed his point, or forgot his
method. The one thing just then to be done was to convince the average
American colonist of the period that it would be ridiculous for him
any longer to remain an American colonist; that the time had come for
him to be an American citizen; that nothing stood in the way of his
being so, but the trash of a few pedants respecting the authority of
certain bedizened animals called kings; and that, whether he would or
no, the alternative was at last thrust into his face upon the point
of a bayonet,--either to declare for national independence, and a
wide-spaced and resplendent national destiny, or to accept, along with
subserviency to England, the bitterness and the infamy of national
annihilation. With all its crudities of thought, its superficiality,
and its rashness of assertion, _Common Sense_ is a masterly pamphlet;
for in the elements of its strength it was precisely fitted to the
hour, to the spot, and to the passions of men. Even its smattering of
historical lore, and its cheap display of statistics, and its clumsy
attempts at some sort of political philosophy, did not diminish the
homage with which it was read by the mass of the community, who were
even less learned and less philosophical than Paine, and who, at any
rate, cared much more just then for their imperilled rights, than they
did either for philosophy or for learning. The immediate practical
effects of this pamphlet in America, and the celebrity which it soon
acquired in Europe as well as in America, are a significant part of
its history as a potential literary document of the period. In every
impassioned popular discussion there is likely to spring up a leader,
who with pen or voice strikes in, at just the right moment, with just
the right word, so skilfully, so powerfully, that thenceforward the
intellectual battle seems to be raging and surging around him and
around the fiery word which he has sent shrilling through the air. So
far as the popular discussion of American independence is concerned,
precisely this was the case, between January and July, 1776, with
Thomas Paine and his pamphlet _Common Sense_. Within three months from
the date of its first issue, at least 120,000 copies of it were sold in
America alone. By that time, the pamphlet seemed to be in every one’s
hand and the theme of every one’s talk.
Noble-minded and important as were the various services rendered by
Paine to the American cause, on sea and land, in office and field, they
could in no way be compared, as contributions to the success of the
Revolution, with the work which he did during those same imperilled
years merely as a writer, and especially as the writer of _The Crisis_.
Between December, 1776, when the first pamphlet of that series was
published, down to December, 1783, when the last one left the printer’s
hands, this indomitable man produced no less than sixteen pamphlets
under the same general title, adapting his message in each case to the
supreme need of the hour, and accomplishing all this literary labour in
a condition of actual poverty.
_Thomas Jefferson._--On June 21, 1775, Thomas Jefferson took his seat
for the first time as a member of the Continental Congress. He had
then but recently passed his thirty-second birthday, and was known
to be the author of two or three public papers of considerable note.
Early in June, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, receiving the largest number
of votes, was placed at the head of the committee of illustrious men
to whom was assigned the task of preparing a suitable Declaration of
Independence, and thereby he became the draftsman of the one American
state paper that has reached to supreme distinction in the world, and
that seems likely to last as long as American civilisation lasts.
Whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the
world has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its
first appearance or since then,--a fact which seems to tell in favour
of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original
publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again
and again, either in anger or in contempt, by friends as well as by
enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well
as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, it has
been censured for its form; for its misstatements of fact, for its
fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for
its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare
statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally, for its
grandiose and vapouring style. Yet, probably no public paper ever more
perfectly satisfied the immediate purposes for which it was sent forth.
From one end of the country to the other, and as far as it could be
spread among the people, it was greeted in public and in private with
every demonstration of approval and delight. To a marvellous degree, it
quickened the friends of the Revolution for their great task. Moreover,
during the century and more since the close of the Revolution, the
influence of this state paper on the political character and the
political conduct of the American people has been great beyond all
calculation.
No man can adequately explain the persistent fascination which
it has had, and which it still has, for the American people, or
for its undiminished power over them, without taking into account
its extraordinary literary merits--its possession of the witchery
of true substance wedded to perfect form:--its massiveness and
incisiveness of thought, its art in the marshalling of the topics
with which it deals, its symmetry, its energy, the definiteness and
limpidity of its statements, its exquisite diction, at once terse,
musical, and electric; and, as an essential part of this literary
outfit, many of those spiritual notes which can attract and enthrall
our hearts,--veneration for God, veneration for man, veneration
for principle, respect for public opinion, moral earnestness,
moral courage, optimism, a stately and noble pathos, finally,
self-sacrificing devotion to a cause so great as to be herein
identified with the happiness, not of one people only, or of one race
only, but of human nature itself. We may be altogether sure that no
genuine development of literary taste among the American people in any
period of our future history can result in serious misfortune to this
particular specimen of American literature.
_Samuel Adams._--Samuel Adams was a man of letters, but he was so only
because he was above all things a man of affairs. Of literary art,
in certain forms, he was no mean master; of literary art for art’s
sake, he was entirely regardless. He was perhaps the most voluminous
political writer of his time in America, and the most influential
political writer of his time in New England; but everything that he
wrote was meant for a definite practical purpose, and nothing that he
wrote seemed to have had any interest for him aside from that purpose.
Deep as is the obscurity which has fallen upon his literary services
in the cause of the Revolution, the fame of those services was, at the
time of them, almost unrivalled by that of any other writer, at least
in the colonies east of the Hudson River. Born in Boston in 1722,
graduated at Harvard in 1740, he early showed an invincible passion
and aptitude for politics. One principal instrument by means of which
Samuel Adams so greatly moulded public opinion, and shaped political
and even military procedure, was the pen. Of modern politicians,
he was among the first to recognise the power of public opinion in
directing public events, and likewise the power of the newspaper in
directing public opinion. It was, therefore, an essential part of his
method as a politician to acquire and to exercise the art of literary
statement in a form suited to that particular end. He had the instinct
of a great journalist, and of a great journalist willing to screen
his individuality behind his journal. In this service, it was not
Samuel Adams that Samuel Adams cared to put and to keep before the
public,--it was the ideas of Samuel Adams. Accordingly, of all American
writers for the newspapers between the years 1754 and 1776, he was
perhaps the most vigilant, the most industrious, the most effective,
and also the least identified. Ever ready to efface himself in what he
did, he realised that the innumerable productions of his pen would make
their way to a far wider range of readers, and would be all the more
influential, if they seemed to be the work, not of one writer, but of
many. Therefore, he almost never published anything under his own name;
but, under a multitude of titular disguises which no man has yet been
able to number, this sleepless, crafty, protean politician, for nearly
a third of a century, kept flooding the community with his ideas,
chiefly in the form of essays in the newspapers,--thereby constantly
baffling the enemies of the Revolutionary movement, and conducting
his followers victoriously through those battles of argument which
preceded and then for a time accompanied the battles of arms. In the
long line of his state papers--the official utterances of the several
public bodies with which he was connected and which so long trusted
him as their most deft and unerring penman--one may now trace, almost
without a break, the development of the ideas and the measures which
formed the Revolution. If we take into account the strain of thought
and of emotional energy involved in all these years of fierce political
controversy and of most perilous political leadership, we shall hardly
fear to overestimate the resources of Samuel Adams in his true career
of agitator and iconoclast;--especially the elasticity, the toughness,
the persistence of a nature which could, in addition to all this,
undertake and carry through, during the same long period, all the work
he did in literary polemics,--work which alone might seem enough to
employ and tire the strength even of a strong man who had nothing else
to do.
The traits of Samuel Adams the writer are easily defined--for they are
likewise the traits of Samuel Adams the politician, and of Samuel Adams
the man. His fundamental rule for literary warfare was this--“Keep
your enemy in the wrong.” His style, then, was the expression of his
intellectual wariness,--a wariness like that of the scout or the
bushwhacker, who knows that behind any tree may lurk his deadly foe,
that a false step may be his ruin, that a badly-aimed shot may make it
impossible for him ever to shoot again. Whether in oral or in written
speech his characteristics were the same,--simplicity, acuteness,
logical power, and strict adaptation of means to the practical end
in view. Nothing was for effect--everything was for effectiveness.
He wrote pure English, and in a style severe, felicitous, pointed,
epigrammatic. Careful as to facts, disdainful of rhetorical excesses,
especially conscious of the strategic folly involved in mere
overstatement, an adept at implication and at the insinuating light
stroke, he had never anything to take back or to apologise for. In
the wearisome fondness of his country for Greek and Roman analogies,
he shared to the full; and, in a less degree, in its passion for the
tags and gewgaws of classical quotation. Of course, his style bears
the noble impress of his ceaseless and reverent reading of the English
Bible. To a mere poet, he seldom alludes. Among secular writers of
modern times, his days and nights were given, as occasion served, to
Hooker, Coke, Grotius, Locke, Sidney, Vattel, Montesquieu, Blackstone,
and Hume.