The Revolution
If we turn, however, to the literature produced in America between the
passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the adoption of the Constitution in
1787, we perceive that it is a literature of discord and passion. Its
spirit is not that of "one united people." Washington could indeed
declare in his Farewell Address of 1796, "With slight shades of
difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political
principles"; yet no one knew better than Washington upon what a slender
thread this political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had
been to foresee the end from the beginning.
It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period for the
literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of the deeper
secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless change, of action
rather than reflection, of the turning of many separate currents into
one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all hang together," runs
Franklin's well-known witticism in Independence Hall, "or, most
assuredly, we shall all hang separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor!
And that homely, cheery, daring sentence gives the keynote of much of
the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in the
state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the
pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in
the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.
We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the
Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written
by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and
Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the
Mob." They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the
people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate
was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the
majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the
conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of
course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty
pamphlets, eloquent sermons, and sparkling satire in praise of the old
order of things. When their cause was lost forever, they wrote gossipy
letters from their exile in London or pathetic verses in their new home
in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Their place in our national life and
literature has never been filled, and their talents and virtues are
never likely to receive adequate recognition. They took the wrong fork
of the road.
There were gentle spirits, too, in this period, endowed with delicate
literary gifts, but quite unsuited for the clash of
controversy--members, in Crèvecœur's touching words, of the "secret
communion among good men throughout the world." "I am a lover of peace,
what must I do?" asks Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer.
"I was happy before this unfortunate Revolution. I feel that I am no
longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired
with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with
so many watchings." Crèvecœur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly
no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
adventure--which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled
What is an American--was ending tragically in civil war. Another
white-souled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose
Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is
finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the
nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural
refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart
enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York,
England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of
Friends.
The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip
Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our
Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as
Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men
of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like
Francis Hopkinson's Battle of the Kegs, a Hudibrastic satire like
Trumbull's McFingal, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's Columbia.
Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British
prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins,
the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There was patriotic
verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and
it reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly
conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The
immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British
bards of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to
verse-writing, but endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The
reader of Burton E. Stevenson's collection of Poems of American History
can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events of the
Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic themes. He will
see how slenderly equipped for song were most of the later
eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to poetry was the tone
of that hour.
Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the
depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of poetry. "An
old college mate of mine," said James Madison--who was by tradition
Freneau's room-mate at Princeton in the class of 1771--"a poet and man
of literary and refined tastes, knowing nothing of the world." When but
three years out of college, the cautious Madison wrote to another
friend: "Poetry wit and Criticism Romances Plays &c captivated me much:
but I begin to discover that they deserve but a moderate portion of a
mortal's Time and that something more substantial more durable more
profitable befits our riper age." Madison was then at the ripe age of
twenty-three! Professor Pattee, Freneau's editor, quotes these words to
illustrate the "common sense" atmosphere of the age which proved fatal
to Freneau's development. Yet the sturdy young New Yorker, of Huguenot
descent, is a charming figure, and his later malevolence was shown only
to his political foes. After leaving Princeton he tries teaching, the
law, the newspaper, the sea; he is aflame with patriotic zeal; he
writes, like most American poets, far too much for his own reputation.
As the editor of the National Gazette in Philadelphia, he becomes
involved in the bitter quarrel between his chief, Jefferson, and
Alexander Hamilton. His attachment to the cause of the French Revolution
makes him publish baseless attacks upon Washington. By and by he retires
to a New Jersey farm, still toying with journalism, still composing
verses. He turns patriotic poet once more in the War of 1812; but the
public has now forgotten him. He lives on in poverty and seclusion, and
in his eightieth year loses his way in a snowstorm and perishes
miserably--this in 1832, the year of the death of the great Sir Walter
Scott, who once had complimented Freneau by borrowing one of his best
lines of poetry.
It is in the orations and pamphlets and state papers inspired by the
Revolutionary agitation that we find the most satisfactory expression of
the thought and feeling of that generation. Its typical literature is
civic rather than æsthetic, a sort of writing which has been incidental
to the accomplishing of some political, social, or moral purpose, and
which scarcely regards itself as literature at all. James Otis's
argument against the Writs of Assistance in Massachusetts in 1761, and
Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1765, mark
epochs in the emotional life of these communities. They were reported
imperfectly or not at all, but they can no more be ignored in an
assessment of our national experience than editorials, sermons, or
conversations which have expressed the deepest feelings of a day and
then have perished beyond resurrection.
Yet if natural orators like Otis and Henry be denied a strictly
"literary" rating because their surviving words are obviously inadequate
to account for the popular effect of their speeches, it is still
possible to measure the efficiency of the pamphleteer. When John Adams
tells us that "James Otis was Isaiah and Ezekiel united," we must take
his word for the impression which Otis's oratory left upon his mind. But
John Adams's own writings fill ten stout volumes which invite our
judgment. The "truculent and sarcastic splendor" of his hyperboles need
not blind us to his real literary excellencies, such as clearness,
candor, vigor of phrase, freshness of idea. A testy, rugged, "difficult"
person was John Adams, but he grew mellower with age, and his latest
letters and journals are full of whimsical charm.
John Adams's cousin Samuel was not precisely a charming person. Bigoted,
tireless, secretive, this cunning manipulator of political passions
followed many tortuous paths. His ability for adroit misstatement of an
adversary's position has been equaled but once in our history. But to
the casual reader of his four volumes, Samuel Adams seems ever to be
breathing the liberal air of the town-meeting: everything is as plainly
obvious as a good citizen can make it. He has, too, the large utterance
of the European liberalism of his day. "Resolved," read his Resolutions
of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1765, "that there
are certain essential rights of the British constitution of government
which are founded in the law of God and nature and are the common rights
of mankind." In his statement of the Rights of the Colonists (1772) we
are assured that "among the natural rights of the colonists are these,
First, a right to Life; secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property.... All
men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they
please.... When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent."
Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely
demagogic.
"Tom" Paine would have been no match for "Sam" Adams in a town-meeting,
but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in
1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his
endeavors for a livelihood. "Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt," says
Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was "genius in his
eyes," and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him
as an "ingenious, worthy young man," which obtained for him a position
on the Pennsylvania Magazine. Before he had been a year on American
soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political
literature, Common Sense, which appeared in January, 1776. "A style
hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic," wrote Edmund Randolph.
Yet this style of familiar talk to the crowd had been used seventy years
earlier by Defoe and Swift, and it was to be employed again by a gaunt
American frontiersman who was born in 1809, the year of Thomas Paine's
death. The Crisis, a series of thirteen pamphlets, of which the first
was issued in December, 1776, seemed to justify the contemporary opinion
that the "American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the
sword of Washington." Paine, who was now serving in the army, might have
heard his own words, "These are the times that try men's souls," read
aloud, by Washington's orders, to the ragged troops just before they
crossed the Delaware to win the victory of Trenton. The best known
productions of Paine's subsequent career, The Rights of Man and The Age
of Reason, were written in Europe, but they were read throughout
America. The reputation of the "rebellious Staymaker" has suffered from
certain grimy habits and from the ridiculous charge of atheism. He was
no more an atheist than Franklin or Jefferson. In no sense an original
thinker, he could impart to outworn shreds of deistic controversy and to
shallow generalizations about democracy a personal fervor which
transformed them and made his pages gay and bold and clear as a trumpet.
Clear and bold and gay was Alexander Hamilton likewise; and his literary
services to the Revolution are less likely to be underestimated than
Thomas Paine's. They began with that boyish speech in "the Fields" of
New York City in 1774 and with The Farmer Refuted, a reply to Samuel
Seabury's Westchester Farmer. They were continued in extraordinary
letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of
the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation.
Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new
Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly
for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788.
Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of
the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the
Federalist. These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature
"Publius" in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April,
1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than
half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial Whig
literature of England, and in political theory they have little in
common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering.
The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by passion
nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The Federalist
remains a classic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary
American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed
as to the past, confident--but not reckless--of the future. Many
Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with
Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those
writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of
political thinking has been steadying and sound.
In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails
to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill,
but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and
reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: "Let us
raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair; the event
is in the hand of God." The whole personality of the great Virginian is
back of that simple, perfect sentence. It brings us to our feet, like a
national anthem.
One American, no doubt our most gifted man of letters of that century,
passed most of the Revolutionary period abroad, in the service of his
country. Benjamin Franklin was fifty-nine in the year of the Stamp Act.
When he returned from France in 1785 he was seventy-nine, but he was
still writing as admirably as ever when he died at eighty-four. We
cannot dismiss this singular, varied, and fascinating American better
than by quoting the letter which George Washington wrote to him in
September, 1789. It has the dignity and formality of the eighteenth
century, but it is warm with tested friendship and it glows with deep
human feeling: "If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for
talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for
philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing
consolation to know that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter
myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences
of your life to be assured, that, so long as I retain my memory, you
will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your
sincere friend, George Washington."
There remains another Virginian, the symbol of the Revolutionary age,
the author of words more widely known around the globe than any other
words penned by an American. "Thomas Jefferson," writes the latest of
his successors in the Presidency, "was not a man of the people, but he
was a man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of
generous power come from the people." On his father's side Jefferson
came from sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a
Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the "little
mountain"--Monticello--where he built a mansion for his bride and where
he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, gray-eyed, gifted boy was
reputed the best shot, the best rider, the best fiddle-player in the
county. He studied hard at William and Mary over his Greek, Latin,
French, Italian, and Spanish, but he also frequented the best society of
the little capital. He learned to call himself a Deist and to theorize
about ideal commonwealths. There was already in him that latent
radicalism which made him strike down, as soon as he had the power, two
of the fundamental principles of the society into which he was born, the
principle of entailed property and that of church establishment.
Such was the youth of twenty-two who was thrilled in 1765 by the Stamp
Act. In the ten years of passionate discussion which followed, two
things became clear: first, that there had long existed among the
colonists very radical theoretical notions of political freedom; and
second, that there was everywhere a spirit of practical conservatism.
Jefferson illustrates the union of these two tendencies.
He took his seat in the Continental Congress in June, 1775. He was only
thirty-two, but he had already written, in the summer of 1774, A Summary
View of the Rights of British America which had been published in
England by Burke, himself a judge of good writing and sound politics.
Jefferson had also prepared in 1775 the Address of the Virginia House of
Burgesses. For these reasons he was placed at the head of the Committee
for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over
the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how
Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first draft, how
the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which proceeded
to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin tried to
comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the sign of
John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the
charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy
Pickering and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at intervals
ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I gathered my
ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I
turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider
it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer
no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." O wise young man,
and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that
crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts
and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of
him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan reading
and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a
"commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two
years before," into an immortal manifesto to mankind.
Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical, dealing with
"self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths
dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of
derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be
French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very
English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with
consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in
Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after
the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and
enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination
of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the
opinions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national
sentiments and national reasons to a "candid world."
It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted
Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during
the last decades--to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident
truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at
those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of
them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence
of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his phrase,
"all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase about
governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed." Editors and congressmen and even college professors have
proclaimed themselves unable to assent to these phrases of the
Declaration, and unable even to understand them. These objectors belong
partly, I think, in Jefferson's category of "nervous
persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on to define them--"whose
languid fibres have more analogy with a passive than an active state of
things." Other objectors to the phrase "all men are created equal" have
had an obvious personal or political motive for refusing assent to the
proposition. But "no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's
biographers, "has ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except
intentionally."
Nobody would claim today that Thomas Jefferson's statement of the
sentiments and reasons for the independence of the thirteen British
colonies in 1776 was an adequate handbook of political wisdom, fit for
all the exigencies of contemporary American democracy. It is not that.
It is simply, in Lincoln's phrase, one of "the standard maxims of free
society" which no democracy can safely disregard.
Jefferson's long life, so varied, so flexible, so responsive to the
touch of popular forces, illustrates the process by which the Virginia
mind of 1743 became the nationalized, unionized mind of 1826. It is
needless here to dwell upon the traits of his personal character: his
sweetness of spirit, his stout-heartedness in disaster, his scorn of
money, his love for the intellectual life. "I have no ambition to govern
men," he wrote to Edward Rutledge. He was far happier talking about
Greek and Anglo-Saxon with Daniel Webster before the fire-place of
Monticello than he ever was in the presidential chair. His
correspondence was enormous. His writings fill twenty volumes. In his
theories of education he was fifty years ahead of his time; in his
absolute trust in humanity he was generations ahead of it. "I am not one
of those who fear the people," he declared proudly. It is because of
this touching faith, this invincible and matchless ardor, that Jefferson
is today remembered. He foreshadowed Lincoln. His belief in the
inarticulate common people is rewarded by their obstinate fidelity to
his name as a type and symbol. "I know of no safe depository of the
ultimate powers of society but the people themselves," wrote Jefferson,
and with the people themselves is the depository of his fame.