Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic 9780812294521

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Poetics of Resistance
Chapter 2. War and Literary War
Chapter 3. Poetry and Conspiracy
Chapter 4. The Language of Liberty
Chapter 5. The Voice of the People
Chapter 6. Mirror Images
Chapter 7. The Triumph of Democracy
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Poetry Wars

Early American Studies

Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Poetry Wars

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Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Colin Wells

U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y l va n i a P r e s s

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-​­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-​­free paper 10 9 8 7 6  5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data Names: Wells, Colin, 1965– author. Title: Poetry wars : verse and politics in the American Revolution and early   republic / Colin Wells. Other titles: Early American studies. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press,   [2018] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017017187 | ISBN 9780812249651 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—Revolutionary period, 1775–1783—   History and criticism. | American poetry—1783–1850—­   History and criticism. | Political poetry, American—History and  ­criticism. | Verse satire, American—History and criticism. | Politics in  literature. Classification: LCC PS314 .W45 2018 | DDC 811/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017187

For Martha, Maggie, and Lizzie

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Contents

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Introduction 1 Chapter 1

The Poetics of Resistance 19 Chapter 2

War and Literary War 55 Chapter 3

Poetry and Conspiracy 95 Chapter 4

The Language of Liberty 127 Chapter 5

The Voice of the People 166

viii   Contents Chapter 6

Mirror Images 206 Chapter 7

The Triumph of Democracy 232 Epilogue 278 Notes 287 Index 327 Acknowledgments 341

Introduction

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uring the period of the American Revolution and the first decades of the early republic, dozens of poets—​­from the era’s most celebrated writers to its most obscure amateur versifiers and balladeers—​­engaged in a series of literary wars against political leaders, newspaper editors and journalists, and each other, all in the name of determining the political course of the new nation. For those in our own time who are accustomed to thinking of poetry as an elevated form, antithetical to the vulgar world of political attack and counterattack, the idea of poetry as a weapon of political or ideological warfare may seem counterintuitive. Yet poems and songs on political affairs were a ubiquitous part of eighteenth-​­century political culture, appearing as broadsides and pamphlets and in the pages of newspapers, whose numbers grew exponentially during the period. Poems commemorated and satirized the most momentous and the most trivial of political controversies, from the debate over the Constitution to the outcome of a fistfight between rival members of Congress. From the time of the Stamp Act crisis to the end of the first party system, poems resisted the directives of King George’s vice-​­regents in America; eulogized and demonized Washington and Adams, Hamilton and Jefferson; satirized the emerging political parties as dangerous factions that threatened the republic from within; and called for war or peace with Britain and France. My purpose in the following pages is to reconstruct this atmosphere of literary-​­political warfare as it unfolded against the backdrop of America’s early national formation. The poetry wars of the Revolution and early republic arose out of a unique intersection of poetic form and political discourse that developed in the print

2   Introduction public sphere between 1765 and 1815. What I describe as poetic or literary warfare began in the years immediately prior to the Revolution as a strategy for highlighting one of the great political problems posed by the conflict: that of embodying power or authority in language or texts. Amid a struggle in which rival authoritative bodies issued directives to the people in the form of printed texts—​­proclamations by royal governors and military commanders or popular declarations by committees of correspondence, colonial assemblies, and the new Congress—​­poets sought to neutralize the ideological force of such authoritative documents by highlighting their linguistic or rhetorical elements. Spurred on by a sense that this strategy had been instrumental in aiding the Revolutionary War effort, poets of the early national period internalized a corresponding sense of political agency just as the earliest arguments were being advanced about the course the new government should follow. Such was the logic by which poetry became a powerful mode for giving voice to the nascent political parties in the 1790s and after. On the way to advancing this argument, the more modest aim of this book is to recover for contemporary readers a substantial body of American political poetry that has gone largely unexamined in any systematic fashion. For though the literature of the Revolutionary era has been the subject of several broad studies over the years, most date back to the early twentieth century, with the most recent appearing more than a generation ago. And while several book-​­length treatments have appeared in recent decades to fill the once-​­yawning gap in our understanding of British-​­American poetry from the early eighteenth century, the equally prolific period of poetic output after the Revolution has been approached more narrowly, in studies of individual authors or small circles of literary collaborators. Poetry Wars seeks to tie many of these disparate threads together with my own research into the hundreds of political poems that have gone all but ignored by modern readers, in order to tell what I believe is one of the major literary stories of the era: that of the direct engagement by poets in the formative political struggles of the new American nation.1 The four decades following the outbreak of the Revolution represent a high-​­water mark in the history of American political poetry. This is perhaps not surprising when we recall that the poets most celebrated during this ­period—​­John Trumbull, Philip Freneau, Timothy Dwight—​­as well as many of the period’s most anthologized poems—​­Phillis Wheatley’s “Liberty and Peace,” Joel Barlow’s The Conspiracy of Kings—​­engaged explicitly with politics

Introduction   3 or affairs of state. Yet these names and titles make up only a fraction of the hundreds of poems published and the scores of poets who penned them. To propose a collective study of political poetry thus involves bringing many largely forgotten works into conversation with those poems that have drawn the most scholarly attention. Thus, for instance, Trumbull’s M’Fingal is analyzed in these pages, befitting its enormous popularity in the half-​­century following its publication in 1776; yet equally prominent is his forgotten verse parody, A New Proclamation!, which appeared a year earlier amid General Thomas Gage’s declaration of martial law in Massachusetts. Freneau, similarly, figures prominently in this book, but not the oft-​­anthologized, proto-​ ­Romantic Freneau of “The House of Night” and “The Indian Burial Ground” so much as the furiously partisan author of A Voyage to Boston and “The Republican Genius of Europe.” More important still, I examine these works alongside the considerably larger number of poems and songs by authors whose names are known only by brief entries in indexes of American biography, or, more often, who remain unknown to this day.

Poems in Retaliation In bringing together this extensive body of poems, I argue for a conception of political poetry not merely as a subset of early American poetry that happens to be characterized by its political content but as a genre or cultural form in its own right, with its own origin, history, and implicit aesthetics. In this sense, I hope to do for political verse what other scholars have done for the early American theater, for instance, or for parades or patriotic ­celebrations—​­that is, to examine the significance of this cultural form within the broader formation of American national identity. Given the sheer number of poems that engaged explicitly with politics, one might wonder why the form has remained largely ignored by scholars of early American literature even as many other once-​ ­obscure forms—​­sentimental novels, diaries, travelogues, belles lettres—​­have enjoyed unprecedented scholarly interest in recent decades. Part of the reason may stem from frustrations involved with reading poems that are so highly topical—​­often requiring, even as a condition of first-​­level comprehension, a familiarity with names and references that, while wholly recognizable in their own time, are obscure to modern readers. Yet beyond this is the fact that American political verse from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has never fully shaken off the verdict, delivered by its earliest generation of

4   Introduction scholarly readers, that it is simply unworthy of serious attention as literature. Even the term commonly used to describe it—​­“verse,” as opposed to “­ poetry”—​ s­ uggests an occasional or forgettable, rather than enduring, form of expression, not quite deserving the designation of poetry. Nor was such verse considered by early critics as worthy of the designation “American,” as the tendency of eighteenth-​­century American poets to model their works on those of British precursors suggested an unforgivable failure, as one critic described it, to declare their “literary independence” from Britain.2 Such pronouncements have been corrected in recent decades by readers who have rightly pointed out that these older critiques were grounded in aesthetic assumptions that the poets of the early republic simply didn’t share. To infuse one’s poetry with allusions to well-​­known literary touchstones by Dryden, Pope, or Swift, now appears less as gratuitous imitation than as a conscious act of invoking a tradition whose symbolic resonances were themselves politically and ideologically charged. Beyond this, the tendency to dismiss political or topical verse is now more likely to be understood in the context of the development described in recent years as the “lyricization of poetry,” which evolved during the century following the period covered in this book. Culminating in the triumph of the New Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s—​­roughly the same moment that the first literary histories of the United States were being written—​­this was a process by which poetry as a whole came to be defined and measured according to standards associated with lyric poetry. From Cleanth Brooks’s insistence on a work as a self-​ ­contained entity whose meaning necessarily transcends history to the now-​ ­famous New Critical pronouncement that interpretation must never extend beyond the poem itself, this model left little room for appreciating a body of poems whose meaning depended on the manifold contexts that surrounded their subject matter, origin, and dissemination.3 Still, it is one thing to point out misplaced aesthetic judgments and another to immerse oneself sufficiently in the literary assumptions governing a body of verse to understand it, as it were, on its own terms. Such an act begins by recognizing the signature feature of political poetry from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—​­namely, its tendency to orient its meaning outward from the individual poem to other literary or discursive utterances circulating at the same moment. What has been disparaged as derivative or imitative, I argue, is actually a central element of the conscious referentialism of this poetry. Indeed, in dozens of cases described below, the meaning of one

Introduction   5 poem arises chiefly from its capacity to evoke and transform other linguistic forms, through allusion or parody or some other strategy of “speaking back” to one or more targeted texts circulating in public. To illustrate the pervasiveness of this quality, let us consider a single poem by Lemuel Hopkins, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1795 under the title The Democratiad: A Poem, in Retaliation, for the “Philadelphia Jockey Club.” By a Gentleman of Connecticut (Figure 1). As the title states rather explicitly, the publication of this poem is announced as an act of “retaliation” against another poem that had appeared earlier that year, The Philadelphia Jockey Club: Or, Mercantile Influence Weighed. Consisting of Select Characters Taken from the Club of Addressers, by Timothy Tickler. This latter title, in turn, reveals a poem made up of several satiric portraits of Philadelphia merchants whose support for the Jay Treaty was condemned by opponents as a case of placing economic self-​­interest above the public good. The Democratiad, in this context, stands as a counter-​ s­atire against local civic leaders who were at the time protesting the treaty as a capitulation to Britain and an affront to America’s “true” ally, France.4 Nor is the full scope of the poem’s referential quality limited to this circumstance alone, for as the subtitle also points out, The Democratiad was not originally written for a Philadelphia audience at all but was penned by “a Gentleman of Connecticut.” In fact, it had first appeared earlier that year in the Connecticut Courant as an installment of “The Echo” series, in which Hopkins (along with several collaborators) had for several years been satirizing the emergent opposition to Washington’s administration by composing verse parodies of their letters, speeches, and newspaper articles. The Democratiad, in fact, began its life as a parody of a letter by a Virginia senator who had leaked the content of the Jay Treaty to the opposition press. The strategy of the poem as “echo” was thus to recast the senator’s self-​­described gesture on behalf of governmental transparency into something more sordid, a deliberate provocation of public demonstrations against the treaty by those whom the poem represents as “noisy demagogues.” Nor is the poem’s outward textual orientation limited even to these references, for as the word “Democratiad” indicates, the poem is also a mock epic, a genre made famous by such works as Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. Indeed, The Democratiad is one of a series of mock epics penned by Federalists during the period of the Jay Treaty controversy. Such extended allusions to Pope’s mock-​­epic masterpiece provided Hopkins and other poets with a literary and historical framework for ridiculing the opponents of the treaty as the political “dunces” of their time.5

Figure 1. Title page, The Democratiad, 1795. Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Introduction   7 Whatever the manifold referentialism of The Democratiad might tell us about the political circumstances of 1795, then, it tells us at least as much about the system of assumptions and practices that governed the poetry wars of the early American republic. As suggested by the label “poem in retaliation,” Hopkins’s is a poetics based not on an ideal of individual poems as self-​­contained, discrete works, or as the distinct artistic property of particular authors. (Indeed, as has long been noted, most poets of the early republican period published their works anonymously or pseudonymously, and a great deal of the poetry of the time was produced collaboratively.) Rather, Hopkins conceived his poem as a single move within a larger discursive chain, and understood its creation as an act of creative transformation—​­most immediately, of another printed text, but more broadly, of political discourse as a whole as it was evolving during the founding period.6 Befitting the atmosphere of political conflict that pervaded the early republican period, the most common manifestation of this tendency t­oward literary referentialism is, as the title of my book suggests, the “poetry war,” which formed around a dynamic of implicit or explicit attack and counterattack by poets vying for ideological victory. Yet this outward orientation from individual poem to broader discourse took other forms as well, including what was occasionally referred to at the time as a literary “vogue,” or fashion, in which several poets responded to a common political event or text by penning variations on a particular form, with each individual poem contributing to the significance of the literary trend as a whole. Accordingly, the project of analyzing this poetry requires a combination of interpretive strategies: first and foremost, it calls for close reading of individual poems, taking each work seriously as poetry (as opposed to mere content or message) by giving sufficient attention to formal elements, such as genre, allusion, symbolism, and tone. Nor is this simply a matter of attending to literary details for their own sake, for as I also emphasize throughout, literary form was itself a frequent and powerful means of communicating ideological content. At the same time, a close reading methodology must be supplemented by drawing on aspects of what has recently been called “distant reading”—​­attending to matters of publication and republication history, often with the aid of research databases unavailable to earlier generations of literary scholars, so as to grasp the importance of those moments when multiple poets or editors were engaging collectively with a political event or topic. Keeping in view this dual objective—​­of unpacking both the meaning of individual poems and the larger chains of

8   Introduction literary or discursive expression—​­I organize the book’s chapters chiefly around episodes of literary-​­political convergence, in which a political event inspires a specific literary response that is, in turn, meant to influence public discourse and, by implication, subsequent political events.7 Beyond attending to political poems as single utterances within a larger field of discursive formation, I also inquire into what happens when political discourse unfolds in the form of poetry. Is there, as one scholar has asked, a “specific form of political work undertaken by poetry which could not be undertaken by any other form of language use?” One answer to this question, offered by E. Warwick Slinn, is that poetry’s power as a mode of enacting political change arises from the fact that, beyond merely describing or representing reality, poetry exists as a performative act: poetry, he writes, “may mimic social discourse, but . . . ​is also itself a cultural event which participates in cultural reality, reconstituting or reshaping that reality.” Whether or not any particular work of verse can be said to have succeeded in reconstituting political reality, this was certainly the objective for the vast majority of poems analyzed in this book.8 More particularly, I argue that political poetry from the Revolutionary and early republican periods sought to alter political reality through the specific mode of linguistic performativity—​­that is, by way of performances that called special attention to issues of language. Such linguistic self-​­consciousness arose out of a collective recognition of what might be called the linguistic or textual aspect of the Revolution itself: for in addition to its obvious significance as an uprising or military conflict, the Revolution was a conflict that pitted competing textual claims to political authority against each other. As my first two chapters—​­“The Poetics of Resistance” and “War and Literary War”—​­illustrate, between the outbreak of the imperial crisis and the end of the Revolutionary War, colonial governors and military commanders issued dozens of proclamations—​­declaring martial law, ordering civilians to stay in their homes, and even forbidding the public from assenting to a rival set of quasi-​­official documents being circulated by the leaders of the resistance. (Such documents included the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1767, the “Solemn League and Covenant” of 1774, and the popular declarations issued by local committees of correspondence, colonial assemblies, and the Continental Congress.) Amid this atmosphere of conflicting demands on the public’s assent, the first important literary vogue of the Revolution emerged—​­that

Introduction   9 of “versifying,” or reproducing in the form of burlesque verse, the language of the proclamation or other authoritative text. The political importance of versification in this context can hardly be overemphasized, for beyond merely enacting a symbolic performance, transforming political prose into poetry called attention to the versification’s status as language. As one literary critic recently remarked, poetry is a unique mode of expression because it foregrounds “language, in its material dimensions”; in contrast to prose, poetry puts on conscious display elements, such as sound, rhythm, and figurative language, which distinguish it from its function as content or discourse. 9 At the same time, what political poets of the Revolution seem instinctively to have recognized is that when such linguistic and performative self-​­consciousness was brought to bear on an authoritative document, it had the paradoxical effect of projecting the same linguistic attention back onto the original text. A verse parody of an official proclamation could thus be used to highlight the degree to which the proclamation was itself a linguistic or rhetorical performance, and in doing so, invalidate its primary ideological objective of embodying power in language. Importantly, this implicit notion of poetry’s capacity to transform discourse endured after the Revolution, as poets of the early republic continued to compose verses that played upon language from speeches, newspaper essays, politically charged hymns or ballads, and of course, other poems. The other element that lent special power to poetry as a mode of discursive intervention was its corresponding emphasis on voice, for in addition to circulating in the form of printed texts, poems—​­and, importantly, songs—​ c­ ould also be performed publicly before small or large groups, including those organized around some political action. The ideological power of such performances may be understood in the context of past studies on the cultural importance of voice and orality as a mode of political communication during the period of American national formation. Such studies remind us that even amid the predominance of print, the spoken word—​­with its heightened tone, volume, and emotional impact—​­stood as both a model for political rhetoric in general and as a strategy of speaking back to textual forms of authority.10 This phenomenon is particularly evident with regard to the many political songs and ballads analyzed in this book, which provided occasions for a chorus of singers to at once enact and symbolize unison in a time of political division. Yet this quality also extended beyond songs alone to become a

10   Introduction metaphor invoked throughout the period, as poets and balladeers claimed that their works represented none other than the voice of the people. The crucial precondition for the emergence of this interplay between poetic and political language was, of course, the print public sphere. This was the world made possible by the proliferation of newspapers and pamphlets and broadsides through the end of the eighteenth century, creating what Jürgen Habermas has called a “world of a critically debating reading public,” at once distinct from the private realm of individuals and the inner workings of the state, within which opinions on affairs of state could be freely exchanged. Originating in the polite social environments of European coffeehouses and salons, the public sphere took particular hold in colonial America in the virtual spaces of print media, providing unprecedented opportunities for political debate among the participants of an emerging writing public. Such a public included, not surprisingly, writers of poetry, who implicitly came to conceive their works as performances before a reading public that was itself coming into consciousness of its own political power.11 Of course, the actual world of print public discourse in eighteenth-​­and nineteenth-​­century America was a far cry from the idealized public sphere originally imagined by Habermas. In such idealized form, this was a public sphere of polite, rational discourse, accessible to a wide variety of participants who, by virtue of the convention of anonymous submission, could assume their ideas would be judged free from the limitations of status imposed in other modes of interaction. Yet notwithstanding the convention of anonymous authorship, which in theory offered a level of discursive equality, in practice the public sphere in eighteenth-​­century America, as numerous scholars have since noted, excluded participation by gender, race, and social and economic status.12 Such forms of exclusion, it must be acknowledged at the outset, were largely true as well for the world of poetic exchanges on political or public matters. Works by women, African Americans, and Native Americans appear infrequently in this sphere of political-​­poetical exchange, and although it is impossible to identify the many anonymous poets who participated in poetic exchanges or poetic warfare, those whose names we know tend to have come from two main groups: the educated, professional classes that also produced most of the political leaders of the new republic, and those associated with the specific trade of print or newspaper publication. In an era in which virtually no one made a living from writing, much less from writing poetry, the practice of penning political verse emanated mainly

Introduction   11 from the social circles of educated professionals. The most famous and prolific political poets in late eighteenth-​­and early nineteenth-​­century America were first and foremost lawyers, clergymen, physicians, and merchants. Such men usually began their writing careers amid the social environment of colonial colleges, where groups of students regularly engaged in competitions of wit. The ability to entertain friends and relations with their literary performances signified their erudition and elite status, and this, in turn, likely contributed to a shared sense of authority over, and responsibility to weigh in on, matters of state. Beyond this group, a significant number of political poets appear to have emerged from the ranks of printers and newspaper editors. For these figures, penning topical verse (or inviting literary-​­minded friends to submit works) amounted to a means of providing entertaining content for their readers’ consumption. From their first appearance in James Franklin’s New England Courant in the early 1720s, poems grew to become a common feature of newspaper culture and an integral part of the discursive life of colonial America. Newspaper poems treated a variety of subjects, from religion and morality to love and domestic happiness; as the eighteenth century wore on, newspaper poems increasingly touched on topics of local or imperial import. It is against this broad cultural backdrop that, in the wake of the crises surrounding the Stamp and Townshend Acts, political verse would emerge as a powerful and permanent weapon in the collective arsenals of partisan editors.13 Still, it would be inaccurate to describe the poetic public sphere as it arose prior to the Revolution and reached its height in the 1790s as purely a bourgeois or elite space. Indeed, a considerable number of political poems from the period were composed by authors who identified themselves explicitly as mechanics, recent immigrants, women, and soldiers, and many anonymous poems communicated through their style that they had been penned by novice poets with little formal education. Such inclusion of nonelite voices, though not representative of the majority of political poets, nonetheless proved crucial to the symbolic and ideological significance of the poetic public sphere. For it appeared to ground in reality a widespread assumption underlying political poetry as a whole—​­namely, that poetic warfare was waged necessarily on behalf of the public. As we shall see throughout, countless poems and literary exchanges involved laying claim to the mantle of the vox populi, usually in opposition to some putatively illegitimate authority. The claim originated as part of a literary-​­political awakening that occurred during the Stamp Act crisis, when printers would compose (or employ their literary

12   Introduction friends to compose) broadside verses decrying the act in the symbolic persona of the “newsboy” or newspaper carrier who—​­by virtue of his age and social status—​­served as a synecdoche for the popular resistance.14 Not only would the carrier’s address itself become a popular genre of political expression well into the nineteenth century, the broader claim to represent the voice of the people would live on as an enduring motif in American political poetry, with subsequent works giving voice to other humble personae—​­the “female patriot,” the Revolutionary soldier, the unemployed sailor of the embargo era—​ ­who claimed to represent the will and interests of the common people in protest against some imposition of state power. At the same time, as illustrated by the fiery tone of many newsboy poems, the poetic public sphere was defined by another form of exclusion—​­not of particular persons but of particular statements or discursive utterances, which were circumscribed within poetic performances as fraudulent, illegitimate, or morally suspect. It should be noted at the outset that the majority of poems examined in this book are satirical in nature, appearing as parodies, burlesques, mock epics or Juvenalian high satires, and their primary outward orientation is necessarily negative or critical t­oward the texts, discourses, and ideas to which they respond. Any analysis of the larger body of political poems from the period, then, reveals a version of the print public sphere that stands in stark contrast to the idealized discursive space defined by politeness, reason, and deliberation. Rather, as indicated by my titular phrase “poetry wars,” it is a sphere characterized by rhetorical conflict and even, at times, rhetorical violence, within which the purpose of a given poem or move is to isolate the ideological “work” of a rival text and nullify its power.15 Finally, to understand the process by which poets imagined they could influence history by shaping political discourse, it is necessary to consider the context of eighteenth-​­century print as one in which political acts and mediations of acts often merged into each other in the chronological unfolding of “the news.”16 Events such as the passage of the Stamp Act, the surrender of Cornwallis, and the ratification of the Jay Treaty reached the reading public via sequentially published newspapers and broadsides that also included poems, songs, and other creative forms. Within this media landscape, a strategically placed poem could appear as a crucial part of a developing news narrative, creating the sense—​­real or imagined—​­of the poem as a causal agent in the process. In the chapters that follow, I recount numerous instances of apparent poetic intervention, from simple tit-​­for-​­tat poetic exchanges compet-

Introduction   13 ing to circumscribe events within larger narratives to complex dialectical fusions of poetry and news as they appeared alongside one another in chronological succession. Within this media context, I argue, poets came to conceive their works as forms of actual, rather than merely virtual, intervention.

Poetic Warfare and Political Formation The dynamic of literary warfare that governed the writing of political verse during the Revolution continued after the war itself gave way to the rhetorical struggles between rival factions over the nature and policies of the newly formed federal government. In a political context in which determining national policy depended on prevailing in a public debate—​­whether to ratify the Constitution, how best to fund the Revolutionary War debt, whether to incite or defuse rising conflicts with Britain and France over international trade—​­poets revived the strategy of engaging directly with texts and discourses they perceived as threatening to the nation’s still-​­precarious survival. Indeed, one of the major claims of this book is that poets implicitly recognized in such debates a crucial similarity to the earlier wartime struggle over political legitimacy—​­in particular, the fact that these debates also hinged on issues of language. For insofar as claiming leadership or enacting policy depended on words, discourses, and the meanings ascribed to them—​­aristocrat, republican, democrat, the rights of man—​­poets could mine the speeches and writings of ascendant leaders for evidence of political apostasy—​­or worse, of factious or sinister designs. By the time the poetry wars of the early republic reached their apex in the 1790s—​­the period covered in greatest detail in this book, encompassing the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters—​­poets not only engaged individually with texts and discourses they deemed threatening to the republic but also began to identify with one of the two proto-​­parties forming around Jefferson and Madison, on one side, and Hamilton and Adams on the other. Defending the policies and rhetoric of Washington’s administration was a large and prolific group of poets, mainly from New England, which included two generations of Hartford Wits (Timothy and Theodore Dwight, Richard Alsop, Lemuel Hopkins, and Elihu Hubbard Smith) and a coterie of like-​­minded poets, such as Robert Treat Paine, Isaac Story, and Thomas Green Fessenden. Against this throng stood a literary opposition whose numbers were smaller but whose political influence was no less potent, and whose sympathies lay with what

14   Introduction Jefferson famously labeled the “Republican interest.” Led by the equally prolific Philip Freneau—​­who began his career as the most fiery of Revolutionary poets and who came to the nation’s capital at Jefferson’s behest to found the opposition newspaper the National Gazette—​­this camp also included the apostate Hartford Wit, Joel Barlow, the jurist-​­poet St. George Tucker of Virginia, and countless lesser-​­known and anonymous versifiers. This is the period in which poets conceived their efforts most fully as poems in retaliation, responding to the works of other poets by circumscribing them within counternarratives designed to negate their ideological force. By the late 1790s, scarcely could a political debate emerge without also appearing in the form of a corresponding debate in verse, in which individual displays of wit served as grounds for claiming literary triumphs, and literary triumphs, in turn, implied a corresponding political triumph for the side with whom a given poet identified.17 In referring to the 1790s as a period of partisan warfare, I am talking not about fully formed or organized political parties but rather about what historians of the early republic refer to as proto-​­parties, which formed after the breakdown of the consensus that had helped bring about the creation of the federal government. In addition to reflecting competing regional and economic interests and rival interpretations of the Constitution, these proto-​ parties reflected conflicting political discourses, as the older language of ­ republican civic virtue came into increasing opposition to an emerging language (identified in particular with the French Revolution) of liberty, equality, and the rights of man. Over the course of the 1790s, the two sides evolved into parties amid a political atmosphere characterized by mutual suspicion and fear, such that partisans came to perceive their rivals’ arguments in decidedly conspiratorial terms—​­as a cover to restore monarchy or to incite violent Revolution in America—​­and thus came to view the partisan division as nothing less than a struggle over the fledgling republic’s very survival. Historians have long noted the hyper-​­partisan rhetoric in the private correspondences of political leaders like Hamilton and Jefferson, but during the 1790s such rhetoric increasingly came to permeate public discourse, largely through the emergence of partisan newspapers and local political associations.18 It is in this context that political poetry would play an outsized role in contributing to this sense of momentous struggle, constructing and projecting symbolic narratives in which even arcane policy matters appeared to contain enormous national implications. Throughout this period, significantly, poets held onto the early assump-

Introduction   15 tion that had sustained the verse wars of the Revolution—​­specifically, that their works represented the voice of the people and functioned to protect the public interest against various narrow factions believed to be plotting to usurp power. Such a claim is not surprising, perhaps, as a descriptor of poems that circulated on behalf of the opposition Republican (or Democratic-​­Republican) Party. This body of verse was characterized, first, by an unreserved embrace of the French Revolution and its corresponding language of the rights of man, and by an application of revolutionary rhetoric to the critique of the government formed during Washington’s presidency, which many Republicans believed had come under the control of aristocrats like Adams, or speculators in the employ of Hamilton’s Treasury. Countering these charges, poets writing in support of the administration—​­who adopted the name Federalist from the original constitutional consensus—​­engaged the Republican critique at the level of both content and form, employing parody and burlesque to recast the opposition as conspiratorial in their thinking and violent in their rhetoric.19 In engaging in this counterstrategy, Federalist poets (by virtue of their more prolific literary output) initially claimed the mantle of wit for their side, projecting a political identity grounded in rational, moderate urbanity, and portraying their opponents as an irrational and extreme faction. As we shall also see, the respective combatants in the poetry wars of the 1790s refused to concede any of their opponents’ characterizations. Republicans countered the Federalist claim to superior wit and urbanity by offering their own wry satiric pieces, such as St. George Tucker’s series of ironic panegyrics to leaders of the administration, crediting them with having successfully created a government that was all but unrecognizable to the Madisonians who had originally supported the Constitution. Yet just as Republican wits refused to allow their opponents to brand them as humorless or extreme, Federalists refused to concede the Republicans’ claim to represent the people’s party. Given the Federalists’ well-​­documented suspicion of populism and Revolutionary rhetoric, their implicit claim to represent the people’s true interests may appear incongruous. Yet Federalist poets infused their works with a series of attacks exposing Republicans leaders as meager embodiments of the vox populi, highlighting their status as wealthy landowners and pedigreed elites whose interests were hardly consistent with those of the small farmers and mechanics for whom they claimed to speak. More significantly, Federalist wits introduced what stands in retrospect as an early version of the critique of nineteenth-​­century white male populism that has been advanced in our own

16   Introduction time—​­namely, that such populism was accompanied by support for policies favoring the removal of Native tribes from the Western territories and the protection and expansion of the Southern slave economy. In this tit-​­for-​­tat atmosphere of political attack and counterattack, I argue, political verse came to occupy a discursive space similar to that later claimed by organized political parties. At a time when elections were contested only indirectly, and the concept of the modern political campaign did not yet exist,20 poems and songs performed a variety of partisan functions, from invoking the preferred political language of one’s own party to defining the opposing party as a dangerous faction and warning against the dire consequences of elevating its leaders to positions of national power. Thus it is that in the period between 1796, the year of the first contested presidential election, and 1801, the year of the first partisan transfer of power, the number and variety of poems of retaliation reached their highest point. Dozens of individual poets and songwriters entered the fray in these years, protesting or advocating for policies and candidates, and ritually naming or defining their opposition as aristocratic or Jacobin, the “party of Britain” or the “party of France.” As is suggested by these latter epithets, moreover, the political and literary struggles surrounding the formation of the new Unites States were not limited to national politics or identity alone but rather involved a crucial transatlantic or transnational context that permeated both culture and politics in the Revolutionary and early republican periods. Indeed, I cite numerous examples of American and British poets who—​­despite writing at odds with each other about events and issues—​­nevertheless draw on a common literary tradition within which, as Leonard Tennenhouse has recently put it, American cultural identity often appears as a “brand of Englishness.”21 By extending this transnational perspective to the poetry wars of the 1790s, moreover, this book seeks to illuminate an additional set of complications. Insofar as the first party system arose against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Anglo-​ ­French wars of the 1790s, the debate over America’s political identity itself came into being amid this imperial conflict. As we shall see, this triangular relationship between Britain, France, and the United States made for a variety of complex intersections among culture, politics, and nationalism. Such is the backdrop, for instance, in which an American Republican such as St. George Tucker could draw on the English satiric persona of Peter Pindar to attack the administration and to defend the French Revolution, only to be answered by

Introduction   17 a group of Federalist wits employing the identical literary allusion to paint Tucker’s party as would-​­be American Jacobins. Considering this example alongside the countless other distinct poetic genres invoked during the decade—​­carrier’s addresses, verse parodies, mock epics and epic fragments, ironic celebratory odes and earnest martial hymns, to name only some—​­reminds us that political poetry in the 1790s was never wholly reducible to politics alone but always contained a crucial aesthetic dimension distinct from a given poem’s content or message. In the case of most of the poems analyzed in this book, aesthetic elements such as verse form, genre, and allusion can be seen to heighten a poem’s political impact through the “ideology of form,” in which a work’s formal or generic qualities communicate ideological content. At the same time, the relationship between form and ideology may be seen to reflect a broader intersection of aesthetics and politics that pervaded the period. This book examines both the consistencies and the tensions that arose between the poetic and the political dimensions of political verse.22 Such intersections come into particular view in my analysis of literary warfare in the 1790s: thus, for instance, in Chapter 4, “The Language of Liberty,” I describe how Federalist poets first developed their strategy for satirizing the preferred political discourse of emerging Republicans by attending not simply to political implications alone but to tone and affect. I also examine how these same Federalists endeavored, with mixed success, to combine the aesthetic and the political, pushing the boundaries of satiric complexity and literary play to the point of compromising the clarity of their message. This tension between the aesthetic and the political is also the subject of my sixth chapter, “Mirror Images,” in which I argue that the growing popularity of engaging in literary exchanges ultimately came to undermine the political impact of political verse as a whole. For in an environment in which virtually every controversy became fodder for literary satire, and virtually every genre spawned a response composed in that identical genre, poetic warfare as a whole dwindled into a ritual that diluted the impact of any single poetic utterance, ultimately leading to what I call a literary-​­political stalemate in the last years of the 1790s. The other crucial complication to the collective ambition of poets to influence the political course of the republic, of course, was the simple fact that in the real world of electoral politics a literary or satiric triumph did not necessarily prefigure a corresponding political victory. This was the reality to which Federalist poets awakened after the election of 1800, as I describe in my final

18   Introduction chapter, “The Triumph of Democracy.” Despite having been considerably more prolific, and arguably more proficient, than their Republican counterparts, Federalist poets witnessed the tide of public opinion turn away from their party, undermining the confidence they once had in their ability to intervene in history. Facing this reality, they devised a number of strategies, first in an effort to reverse the electoral losses that began in 1800 but would continue for most of Jefferson’s presidency, and then to cope with finding themselves on what they increasingly saw as the losing side of a grand ideological struggle. In this situation, more than a few Federalist poets came to disavow their earlier claim to speak for the people at large and instead began to project in their works an alternative community of like-​­minded writers who were fully conscious of their status as a political minority. Yet others fought on, paralleling in verse and song the Federalist Party’s brief resurgence in popularity between the Embargo Act crisis and the War of 1812. The final political decline of the Federalists, amid the fallout from their vocal opposition to the war, also played out in the poetic public sphere: in satirizing their leaders for waging an unnecessary war, Federalist poets went further than they ever had in questioning their loyalty to the cause. Chastened by a barrage of martial ballads and inquiries into their patriotism, Federalists would abandon their political campaign, and the poetry wars of the early republic would end as they began—​­in the midst of intense ideological conflict made all the more severe by the presence of war. Taken as a whole, Poetry Wars aims to highlight the importance of political poetry at virtually every point in the story of the American Revolution and the subsequent formation of the federal government and the first party system. In bringing poetry to the forefront of these developments, I hope to illuminate the relationship between culture and politics more broadly, complementing existing studies of voting patterns and party organization with a dynamic story of how political identities were formed amid shifting rhetorical strategies in response to rival arguments and unfolding events. I hope as well to help uncover a world of unspoken assumptions that governed the practice of writing and disseminating political verse during what appears in retrospect as the golden age of this cultural form. Finally, by contributing my own analyses of scores of individual poems, and by describing and referencing countless others, I hope to make these works more accessible to literary scholars and historians, in support of yet unimagined future studies of American history and culture.

Chapter 1

h The Poetics of Resistance Proclamations and Versifications: The Literary Opposition to General Gage In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the series of laws officially called the Coercive Acts, but soon known throughout the colonies as the Intolerable Acts, intended to force the people of Massachusetts Bay into submitting to what they understood to be the rightful authority of the king and Parliament. The Port Act closed Boston to commercial shipping, the Administration of Justice Act moved criminal trials for colonial subjects to Great Britain, and the Massachusetts Government Act called for all public officials to be appointed by the Crown. Corresponding with the new emphasis on coercion was the replacement of Thomas Hutchinson as royal governor of the colony by General Thomas Gage, who simultaneously held the position of commander in chief of the king’s North American forces, and who had personally advocated a more aggressive strategy of dealing with the rebels. Arriving in New England in May 1774, Gage immediately set out to issue his orders in the manner royal vice-​­regents had always done, in a series of printed official proclamations. Yet in doing so, Gage unwittingly triggered a sudden and largely unprecedented literary reaction, giving rise to an as yet unremarked subgenre of early American poetry—​­what today would be described simply as verse parody, but what was designated at the time by the more precise term “versification.” By the fall of 1775, when Gage’s tenure as governor came to an early and

20   Chapter 1 ignominious end, Gage’s proclamations had inspired numerous separate versifications, not only in Boston, where the effects of his proclamations were most directly felt, but also in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Such verse parodies ranged in length from fewer than twenty lines to several hundred, in some cases appearing as brief submissions in newspapers and in others as broadsides or longer pamphlets. They were penned by anonymous amateur versifiers whose modest skill at composing poetic meter betrayed their inexperience and likely lack of formal education, as well as by the two best-​­remembered poets of the Revolution, John Trumbull and Philip Freneau. More important, the versification vogue, as it was called, extended beyond Gage’s own proclamations to those issued by other vice-​­regents and military commanders, from Howe to Burgoyne, and in at least a few cases, were turned back against the directives of Washington and the Continental Congress by British and Loyalist wits. As one participant observed at the time, “Of late, Versification is come in vogue, and now Proclamations, Speeches, Messages, Orations, &c. seem not to be relished in plain prose, but, to please the public Taste, they must be versified.”1 This comment notwithstanding, the vogue for versifications was never simply a matter of appealing to the public taste for verse rather than prose. The near simultaneous appearance of verse parodies of Gage’s proclamations instead reflected a deeper recognition, first, of the manner in which the proclamation as a form functioned to assert political authority and, second, of the capacity of poetry—​­or more precisely, verse—​­to neutralize that power. Let us begin with the proclamation as a form of legal text: what did it mean to issue a proclamation in colonial America prior to the Revolution? In one sense, it meant little because the form had long become ubiquitous, and its purposes—​ n ­ ot unlike proclamations issued occasionally by modern politicians—​­were often innocuous. Fundamentally, proclamations communicated official information to the people, informing them about a new law, redefining colonial boundaries, or announcing occasions of public thanksgiving or celebration (to cite only a few examples of what amounted to perhaps hundreds of proclamations issued prior to 1774). In another sense, however, to issue a proclamation meant a great deal: as a formal order announced to the public by a monarch or a representative of the monarchy, the proclamation had always constituted a special kind of printed text, one that self-​­evidently demonstrated and enacted a legal authority to compel the king’s subjects to act or assent to its contents. Indeed, as was made most explicit by the practice of reading a proclamation in public, the proclamation declared the king’s will to his sub-

Figure 2. Thomas Gage, By His Excellency, the Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq., 1775. Gage’s proclamation of June 12, 1775, which declared martial law in Massachusetts Bay. Library of Congress.

22   Chapter 1 jects, interpellating its audience as subject to the king’s coercive power as much as to the concrete directives of the proclamation itself.2 At the same time, as even a casual acquaintance with eighteenth-​­century proclamations makes clear, beyond merely enacting monarchical authority, the proclamation also performed this authority by way of various rhetorical and iconographic techniques that had defined the proclamation as a genre. Most colonial proclamations, for instance, included a prominent royal seal at the head of the document, and nearly all began with an elaborate enumeration of the titles of authority claimed by the vice-​­regent as well as a rationale for how that authority emanated ultimately from the king: “By His Excellency The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq; Governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same” (see Figure 2). In addition, the body of the text was usually characterized by a ceremonious or legalistic tone, often following the familiar pattern of “whereas” clauses followed by a formal declaration of law, and nearly always concluded with a record of the precise time and place of its issue, thus highlighting its role as the formal agent by which a law comes into existence: “Given at Boston, the Twelfth Day of June, in the Fifteenth Year of the Reign of His Majesty GEORGE the Third, By the Grace of God, of Great-​­Britain, France and Ireland, KING, Defender of the Faith, &c.”3 This is the proclamation, in short, as a self-​­consciously performative representation of a ruler’s power “not for but ‘before’ the people,” to borrow the phrase long since used by Jürgen Habermas to describe the communication of political power before the structural transformation of the public sphere into a “sphere of public authority,” capable of compelling other forms of political authority to “legitimate” themselves “before public opinion.” Representing the king’s power before the people is certainly what General Gage appears to have had in mind when issuing his first proclamations to the people of Boston in the spring and summer of 1774. Yet the versification vogue that ensued illustrates that, regardless of the authorial intentions that were built into the proclamation as a form, the public perception of its implicit claim to authority was indeed undergoing a transformation. Gage’s proclamations and the manifold literary responses to them constitute a particularly fraught episode in the generic history of the proclamation, containing a number of implications not only for Gage’s own brief career as governor and commander in chief but also for the history of political verse as a mode of public discourse.4

The Poetics of Resistance   23 By the time of Gage’s arrival in Boston, it was clear in several respects that the ideological assumptions concerning the relationship between power and printed texts were already undergoing a shift, one that did not bode well for the expectation that a proclamation would be treated implicitly as the law. For one thing, the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts protests had undermined any expectation that even a direct declaration of law would simply be assented to by a passive public. For another, colonial leaders had for some time been engaged in what William B. Warner recently described as the communications war that preceded the Revolution. Going back at least to the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768 (which had declared the Townshend Acts unconstitutional), this textual struggle began in earnest with a series of rival authoritative documents issued by the Boston Committee of Correspondence, including the public nonimportation pact known as the “Solemn League and Covenant,” which appeared a month after Gage’s arrival. Against this backdrop, Gage’s proclamations from the summer of 1774 appear as a concerted attempt to reverse this discursive trend by reasserting the vestigial authority once granted to royal proclamations. Indeed, one of Gage’s first publicly issued proclamations registered this reality immediately: in response to the Boston committee’s call for a suspension of all trade with Britain unless the Port Law be rescinded, Gage issued “A Proclamation for discouraging certain illegal Combinations,” which declared illegal not only the specific recommendations of the Committee but even its very authority to make such recommendations. His proclamation, in effect, proclaimed that no other proclamation should be obeyed.5 This was hardly an ideal situation for a royal governor to find himself in, which is why, perhaps out of frustration, Gage followed this act by issuing a very different sort of proclamation—​­not to give a new order or make a new rule but, as the title put it, “For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for preventing and punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality.” Gage well knew that the problem his government faced in 1774 was neither vice nor profaneness but open resistance by a growing number of Bostonians. Why he chose to take this more indirect approach is hinted at in the first paragraph, which states his intention to begin his term of office by imitating King George’s own inaugural act when he ascended to the throne in 1760: In humble Imitation of the laudable Example of our most gracious Sovereign GEORGE the Third, when in the first Year of his Reign

24   Chapter 1 was pleased to Issue his Royal Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for preventing Vice and Immorality. . . . ​I therefore, by and with the Advice of his Majesty’s Council, publish this Proclamation, exhorting all his Majesty’s Subjects to avoid all Hypocrisy, Sedition, Licentiousness, and all other Immoralities, and to have a grateful Sense of all God’s Mercies, making the divine Laws the Rule of their Conduct.

The key word here is sedition, and this theme becomes increasingly emphatic as the proclamation approaches its concrete purpose: to require justices of the peace to restore law and order and to urge the local clergy, who might have been sympathetic ­toward the committee and its supporters, to use their sermons to inculcate a due submission to authority. Gage thus seems to intend for his second proclamation to restore the colony to an earlier moment, when proclamations like his own would implicitly have been followed. 6 The extraordinary nature of this second proclamation was immediately and broadly registered, as it was soon answered by two separate versifications—​­one in Boston, which appeared in the form of a broadside, and the other in the pages of the Virginia Gazette (which was itself promptly reprinted as a broadside in Boston). Both parodies seized on Gage’s patronizing tone in expressing his desire to encourage “piety” and “virtue” among the people, and both announced themselves as the people’s response to Gage’s encouragement, both explicitly in their content and implicitly in their form, which communicated the populism of the response through their apparent disregard for traditional poetic technique. Thus, in verses that strayed both from strict poetic meter and a strict code of literary decorum, the first versification, entitled simply “A Proclamation,” drew on the language of educational primers to recast the relationship between Gage and “his Majesty’s subjects” as that of a petty schoolmaster and the “girls and boys” to whom he lectures condescendingly: To all his pretty girls and boys; That live in our town, This Proclamation I address, In hopes of great renown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Would you be counted wise and great; Shun ev’rything that’s ill,

The Poetics of Resistance   25 And evermore submit yourselves Obedient to my will. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . That they in their respective schools, May ever watchful be, To train the youth to my commands, In strict conformity. All naughty boys you must correct, With birch and ferule too: For spare the rod and spoil the child, A saying is most true. Gage the schoolmaster goes on to promise “favours” such as “cakes and sugar plumbs” to children who are obedient, but to those who are not, he adds a curious threat: “But if you should rebellious prove, / For all that do amiss, / I keep at home a monstrous red / A red veil soak’d in p[iss].”7 The latter reference to the red veil seems to have originated from the inaccurate belief that Gage, who was from Ireland, was a Roman Catholic. Though the parody never elaborates on the veil’s function, the image played into stereotypes of the Inquisition, depicting Gage as not merely pedantic but cruel. Such emphasis on the general’s potential for ruthlessness, in turn, underscored the function of the parody itself as an act of public resistance, demonstrating the people’s willingness to disobey orders whatever the cost, and representing the proclamation’s claim to embody political authority as an utter failure. A similar portrait of Gage is found in “A Parody on a Late Proclamation,” which, like its counterpart, eschewed any claim to high literary artistry, suggesting through its numerous metrical irregularities that the author was a literary novice. Again, however, the author’s implicit ordinariness actually heightens its ideological force by highlighting the contrast between Gage and the people whom he purportedly wishes to “humbly encourage.” For this parody goes further in directing its satire to the person of Gage, presenting him as an ambitious pretender who is particularly drawn to the pomp and affect afforded by the act of issuing his proclamation: Humbly to imitate our Lord the King (As Monkies [sic] do Mankind) in ev’ry Thing, Who, in his first Year’s Reign, to the Nation,

26   Chapter 1 Publish’d a right Royal Proclamation For the Discouragement of Sin and Vice, And the suppressing Immoralities, This great Vice-​­Roy (now plain Thomas Gage, Tho’ further Titles my high Hopes presage) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Do issue, after mature Deliberation, In our first Year, a like Proclamation, Exhorting our Subjects to avoid and fly Licentiousness, Sedition, and Hypocrisy.8 The primary trope of the parody—​­unmasking the governor as playing at being king, and adding that such playacting is itself a symptom of Gage’s appetite for power—​­displaces the governor’s self-​­representation with a parodied Gage, or “counter-​­Gage,” who is at once more ridiculous and more dangerous: thus, for instance, Gage as speaker employs the royal “we,” speaks of the people of Massachusetts as “our subjects” (as opposed to the king’s), and contrasts his current humble station with “high hopes” for “further titles.” Beyond recasting Gage in personal terms, moreover, the parody takes special aim at the regal pomp and theatricality of the text itself, culminating in an echo of Gage’s demand, at the end of his original proclamation, that the document be read ceremoniously before the people: “We hereby require all Justices of the Peace / To cause Offenders ’gainst the Laws to cease, / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ But first, make this Proclamation known, / That, by our Will they regulate their own.”9 This is parody, in short, not simply as a clever form of imitation but (to borrow Isaac D’Israeli’s description of the genre from his 1794 edition of Curiosities of Literature) “a work grafted onto another work” for the purpose of “turning” or transforming the original work’s meaning or representation of truth. Implicit in this definition is a conception of literary creation as involving the act of reading as well as writing, and this assumption underlies much of the poetic warfare of the Revolution and the early republican period. At the same time, in addition to its status as parody, it is the act of versifying, or turning a prose work into verse for a satirical purpose, that is crucial for understanding the versification vogue of 1774–1775 as well as the persistence of versification as a mode of political satire in the decades to follow. Students of eighteenth-​­century British poetry are well aware that versification had long been a popular nonsatirical literary activity, often associated with turning

The Poetics of Resistance   27 biblical texts into poems or songs. The underlying logic of this activity originated in the belief that translating prose into verse signified the elevation of mundane language into something more decorative or figurative. This might seem, at first glance, to be inconsistent with the purpose of parody, which more often works to the opposite effect of deflating the seriousness of elevated or official discourse. Yet the crucial element of the practice of versification involved the further recognition that poetry distinguishes itself from prose by the myriad ways—​­meter, sound devices, linguistic extravagance—​­it calls attention to itself as language (as opposed to content). This is the aspect that allowed the act of versifying an official proclamation to be understood as nullifying the interpellating function of legal or official discourse, by representing it not as a textual manifestation of power but as “mere” language—​­or, more precisely, as no less of a linguistic performance than any other imaginative composition.10 This was not the first time satirical versification had been employed in colonial America as a means of resisting the power of political language. David Shields reminds us, for instance, that the speeches of Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher had been turned into doggerel verse in the 1730s by Joseph Green; beyond this, examples of the genre are found in the satiric attacks against Sir Robert Walpole during the same period in England.11 What was unique about the sudden dissemination of versifications in 1774–1775 was precisely its status as a perceived literary vogue or fashion, culminating in the spontaneous appearance of versifications by numerous authors in different colonies. First, the dynamic of the vogue signified that verse parody was not merely about recasting in negative terms the words of a public figure but about constructing a critical audience representing the public at large, which conceived itself as free to respond to a vice-​­regent’s speech act with approval or, more commonly, censure. This critical power, moreover, was built into the physical appearance of versifications in the form of broadsides, for this was the print mode designed in large part for public display (which was also the reason the broadside was the preferred form for disseminating Gage’s and others’ proclamations in the first place). And though there is no extant record that the anti-​­Gage parodies were publicly displayed in the same locations as the original proclamations, the idea of public textual displacement was implied in the act of imitating a broadside document in the form of a broadside parody. Equally important about the immediate response to Gage’s proclamation is that it was simultaneously parodied by poets from different colonies, creating

28   Chapter 1 the appearance, at least, of an intercolonial response to the Coercive Acts by poets who conceived themselves as part of a unified public in print. That such a public could be conceived at all owed itself to the communications network described in Warner’s Protocols of Liberty, in which local committees of correspondence made use of the vestiges of the British postal system to communicate strategies for responding to the administration in London and the colonial governors under its charge. In this sense, the versification vogue demands to be seen as part of this broader emergence of the increasingly unified colonial resistance that had led to the calling of the First Congress. Indeed, the appearance of a unified satiric response is one of the defining aspects of Gage’s governorship. For once the Pandora’s box of versification was opened in the summer of 1774, Gage could hardly utter a public word without being promptly parodied in verse, with the verifications themselves either originating or being reprinted in nearly every colony from Massachusetts to Virginia.12 In response to the formation of the Provincial Congress in October 1774, Gage issued a proclamation declaring the Congress illegal and ordering the people to ignore its directives and declarations. The proclamation was soon answered by a versification in the Newport Mercury, setting forth a pattern of parodic resistance that would continue past the outbreak of the war itself. Indeed, in the weeks immediately before the Battle of Bunker Hill, Gage gave perhaps his most momentous proclamation to date, declaring martial law in Massachusetts. Notwithstanding that his earlier proclamations had been satirized for their rhetorical extravagance, this time the governor went to the trouble of employing a ghost writer, the newly arrived Major General John Burgoyne, himself the author of numerous poems and plays, including The Maid of the Oaks, which was staged that same year at the Drury Lane Theater. As a hired stylist, Burgoyne did not disappoint, producing a proclamation twice as long as any of Gage’s earlier efforts, representing even more ostentatiously the vice-​­regent’s power before the people. First, the royal seal was significantly larger on this broadside than on Gage’s previous proclamations, and the obligatory list of titles more expansive: “By his Excellency, The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq.; Governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same.” Finally, the tone of the document was decidedly more pompous and indignant, as illustrated in the opening passage: “Whereas the infatuated multitudes, who have long suffered themselves to be conducted by certain well known Incendiaries and Traitors, . . . ​have at length proceeded to avowed rebellion; and the

The Poetics of Resistance   29 good effects which were expected to arise from the patience and lenity of the King’s government, have been often frustrated, and are now rendered hopeless, by the influence of the same evil counsels; it only remains for those who are entrusted with supreme rule . . . ​to prove they do not bear the sword in vain.”13 Given Burgoyne’s literary pedigree, it is fitting that his first foray into the proclamation genre would draw into the versification trend two of the most famous poets of the American Revolution, Philip Freneau and John Trumbull. Scarcely twenty-​­three years old, Freneau was eager to lend his pen to the cause of the resistance, and his parody Thomas Gage’s Proclamation Versified, which appeared in July 1775, was the first of several anti-​­Gage poems he would publish that year. Trumbull, meanwhile, who had already achieved some literary renown for The Progress of Dulness (1772–1773), was petitioned by Silas Deane and other delegates to the Congress to compose a burlesque account of Gage’s military exploits. While working on that poem, which would eventually become the mock epic M’Fingal, he also quickly produced an anti-​­Gage versification entitled A New Proclamation! which appeared in the Connecticut Courant in August 1775 and as a separate pamphlet soon after. Following the tendency of the earlier parodies, Trumbull made much of the idea that the proclamation constituted a discursive or literary form, taking particular aim at Burgoyne’s rhetorical flourishes. Indeed, in the opening lines, he alludes to what many readers would have recognized as the definitive satire of the haughty ­proclamation—​­the one read before Gulliver on behalf of the emperor of Lilliput in the opening section of Gulliver’s Travels. Nor does this allusion merely satirize the vice-​­regent’s affectation, but it comments pointedly on the real limitations of Gage’s power in his army’s losses at Bunker Hill (see Figure 3): By THOMAS GAGE, whom British frenzy, Stil’d honourable and Excellency, O’er Massachusett’s [sic] sent to stand here Vice Admiral and Chief Commander; Whose power Gubernatorial still Extends as far as Bunker’s-​­Hill, Whose Admiralty reaches clever, Full half a mile up Mistic river, Let ev’ry clime and ev’ry nation Attend once more—​­ A PROCLAMATION.

Figure 3. Title page, John Trumbull, A New Proclamation! 1775. Trumbull’s versification of Gage’s proclamation of June 12 self-consciously imitates the iconography and the rhetorical flourishes (such as the ceremonial list of titles) of the original. Library of Congress.

The Poetics of Resistance   31 As in the earlier anti-​­Gage versifications, Trumbull highlights Gage’s self-​ c­ onscious performance by emphasizing the conventions of the proclamation as a form: “WHEREAS th’infatuated creatures, / Still led by folks whom we call traitors. . . .” The parodied Gage acknowledges this pattern of repeating “whereas” clauses through the poem, adding parenthetically near the end, “And now (for bravely we come on, / One more Whereas, and then we’ve done).” Yet ironically, here, the function of the “whereas” clause—​­to set up the proclamation by stating universally acknowledged facts—​­only reinforces the precariousness of Gage’s military authority, forcing him to admit as fact that the rebels have “proceeded to give battle, / And with deep wounds, that fate portend, / Gall’d many a Reg’lar’s latter end.” 14 Along the same lines, in a digression from the original document, the fictional Gage confesses that his entire practice of disseminating proclamations has all along been part of a wholly dishonest propaganda campaign. Elaborating on a statement from the original proclamation about how “the press, that distinguished appendage of public liberty” has been “prostituted to the most contrary purposes,” Trumbull adds fifty lines in which Gage complains that the people have refused to credit the falsehoods put out by Loyalist printers, such as James Rivington and Samuel Draper, before including Gage himself as a chief propagandist: “Did ye not,” Gage asks, “Scare ev’ry Printer bold and wise, / Who dar’d to publish Tory lies? / Nay when myself in Proclamation, / Spread wholesome falsehoods through the nation, / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ Did ye not all refuse to credit, / As if some common lyar had said it”?15 Beyond charging that Gage’s proclamations are inherently dishonest, this passage is significant for the way it circumscribes the entire proclamation/versification phenomenon within the context of an increasingly democratized public sphere. It is not simply that the anonymous public has taken to newspapers and broadsides to speak back to the unidirectional utterances of the king’s vice-​­regent, declaring him to be a liar. It is also that Gage’s proclamations have failed to embody power in language as they have purported to do: they exist rather as merely one form of discourse within a larger struggle among competing writers and printers, each contrasting their opponents’ “counterfeit” representations with their own “genuine” ones. And as long as proclamations continue to pretend to embody imperial power, Trumbull’s poem suggests, they will continue to be unmasked as mere texts. Insofar as this specific exchange involved the immediate question of whether or not Bostonians would turn in their weapons and submit to martial

32   Chapter 1 law, it served as well to symbolize a public commitment to the rebellion and incipient war. Indeed, this point is given special emphasis in Freneau’s contribution to the genre. Seizing on Gage’s promise to pardon those who lay down their arms and “return to the duties of peaceable subjects,” Freneau turns the gesture into a comically detailed catalogue of the many violent punishments that Gage promises not to employ against those who submit: That whosoe’er keeps gun or pistol, I’ll spoil the motion of his systole; Or, whip his breech, or cut his wesen, As haps the measure of his Treason:—​­ But every one that will lay down His hanger bright, and musket brown, Shall not be beat, nor bruis’d, nor bang’d Much less for past offences, hang’d. . . .16 Strictly speaking, this passage is not so much parody as literary inversion, as Freneau is less interested in mimicking Gage’s words than in laying bare the violent tendency concealed by his pretense of restraint. In the context of the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought only days before to the publication of the parody, the message was clear: there would be no turning back in this as yet unnamed war, for to submit to the demands of Gage’s proclamation would be to give up whatever advantage the insurgency had gained in exchange for a false promise of lenience. As war propaganda, the versifications from the summer of 1775 reinforced the belief that a full-​­scale military uprising was not only necessary, but could succeed, precisely because Gage’s power, as measured by the success of his directives, was rapidly dwindling. In his subsequent proclamations, in fact, Gage acknowledged these limitations. One week after the martial law proclamation of June 12, Gage was forced to issue another, this one complaining that his previous order, demanding that the rebels surrender their weapons, had not been followed. Further demands would also be ignored, so that Gage’s final proclamations as governor read like self-​­parodies of official power—​­as, for instance, a proclamation in which Gage offers a reward for the names of those who have stolen the Public Seal of the Province from the Council Chamber. The sense in which this collective satiric resistance contributed to the weakening of British imperial power ensured that the fashion for penning versifica-

The Poetics of Resistance   33 tions would continue even after Gage’s recall. In fact, when his replacement as commander in chief, General William Howe, issued his inaugural proclamation after arriving in Boston, he too was promptly parodied in verse, setting forth a pattern throughout the siege of Boston in which military resistance against Howe’s forces was accompanied by a steady flow of satiric verse.17 Versifications like these would continue to appear for much the Revolutionary War, again, in response to decrees issued by British military officers—​ ­ the most famous being William Livingston’s brilliant versification of a proclamation to the people of New York by General John Burgoyne in the months preceding the Battle of Saratoga. The lasting relevance of the versification would arise, first and foremost, from what I have called the linguistic or textual aspect of the Revolution—​­the struggle waged by rival documents laying claim to political authority. Amid a conflict that hinged, at least in part, on the question of which proclamations, declarations, or directives the public would follow, a poetry geared t­oward undermining attempts to embody power in language would prove a powerful weapon in its own right. Embedded as it was in this specific context, the versification’s moment of cultural ascendancy would last only as long as the conditions of the war required that commandments issued by pro-​­British governors and generals be publicly flouted. Yet I begin with the proliferation of the versification because its significance to the dynamics of discursive and literary warfare will prove surprisingly far-​­reaching—​­in particular because the form has been largely ignored by literary scholars. Yet, as we shall see, the defining assumption that gave rise to the versification vogue—​­that poetry or verse constitutes a unique weapon of political struggle because it keeps always in view its linguistic element—​­would remain relevant long after the Revolutionary War would give way to the party wars that would follow the establishment of the new federal government. This is the context in which poetry will be produced for the express purpose of exposing the contradictions, absurdities, and hidden motives underlying the various discourses invoked by political leaders and political poets alike.

Literary Resistance and the Stamp Act Crisis If the anti-​­Gage versifications of 1774 and 1775 represented in one sense a collective, spontaneous response to one royal governor’s directives, in another sense they were the product of several distinct literary developments that had arisen at least from the time of the Stamp Act, and in some cases

34   Chapter 1 earlier. As noted above, versifications of official discourse had appeared in America as early as the 1740s; the act of posting a satiric poem in a public place for the purpose of competing for the public’s loyalty, moreover, had spawned a subgenre in its own right, the “pump verse,” or pasquinade, which had appeared in manuscript form amid earlier, local political controversies.18 The anti-​­Gage versification campaign, to be sure, differed from these precursor episodes in several respects: the number of poets involved, the cross-​ ­colonial dissemination of the parodies, and, perhaps most important, the intensity of the political and ideological atmosphere in which they appeared (which culminated, of course, in the outbreak of armed conflict). At the same time, this tension itself grew out of the struggle over coercion and resistance that had begun a decade earlier with the passage of the Stamp Act. This is a process by which the perception that the act amounted to an imperial assault on colonial liberty—​­an assault in particular on print culture as the protector of liberty—​­unleashed a series of public protests, which took numerous forms, including that of poetry. Perhaps the most dramatic example of how the Stamp Act crisis transformed American verse—​­another episode, significantly, that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars of the period—​­is the sudden politicization of colonial newsboys. By this I mean not the actual boys who, among their other duties as printer’s assistants, delivered newspapers in and around North American cities, but their literary counterparts, the fictional newsboys who addressed their customers in verse each New Year, either in the pages of the newspaper itself or in special broadsheets produced for the holiday. Reaching back at least to Aquila Rose’s New Year’s poems from the 1720s, newsboys’ verses—​­or carrier’s addresses, as they were also called—​­had by midcentury become an established genre of occasional verse, their popularity owed in large part to the two complementary functions they served. In practical terms, carrier’s addresses provided actual newsboys with the opportunity to wish their customers a happy holiday and to solicit a gratuity for their faithful service; but they also served a crucial ideological purpose, of promoting the benefits of print culture in general, usually by reminding readers of the events the newspaper had reported over the course of the year. In this earlier, traditional guise, such verses were optimistic in tone and traditional in political outlook, often toasting the king’s health or praising his mildness, and nearly always reinforcing the symbolic connections between Britain and its colonial outposts.19 All of this would abruptly change in 1765—​­a fact that is most starkly il-

The Poetics of Resistance   35 lustrated when we compare carrier addresses printed just prior to the passage of the Stamp Act with those published immediately after. The Boston Evening-​ ­ ost’s poem from December of 1764, for instance—​­The News-​­Boy’s Christmas P and New Year’s Verses. Humbly Address’d to the Gentleman and Ladies to whom he carries the Boston Evening-​­Post—​­emphasizes holiday cheer and offers nothing by way of political commentary: “This Time of Joy to all Mankind, / Your News-​­Boy humbly hopes to find, / The Bounty of each generous mind.” By contrast, the broadside poem from the same newspaper from the following year registers even in its title the tense political climate that has arisen in the wake of the Stamp Act: Vox populi. Liberty, property and no stamps. The newsboy who carries the Boston Evening-​­Post, with the greatest submission begs leave to present the following lines to the gentlemen and ladies to whom he carries the news. Here the newsboy speaks not simply in character but through that character as the voice of the people, vowing to defend liberty and property against the unjust decrees of the British Parliament. And far from offering a good-​­natured toast to the king’s health, this newsboy speaks directly and confrontationally to the monarch, comparing the former era of mild governance and colonial liberty to the oppressive political climate brought on by the Stamp Act: Say Monarch! Why thy furrow’d brow Frowns from thy Chariot on us now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At thy approach, when GEORGE first reign’d, Fair Freedom wanton’d in thy Train; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But now she droops, deform’d with Fear; From her dim Eye-​­ball starts the Tear. Whence, too, that grisly Form that bears Bonds made for Innocents to wear? Will British steel in GEORGE’s Reign, Bend for to form a Subject’s Chain?20 Broadside and newspaper poetry such as this, protesting the Stamp Act as the disastrous event of 1765 or celebrating its repeal as the triumphal moment of 1766, appeared throughout the colonies, moving outward from Boston, the early epicenter of the resistance, to New York, Philadelphia, and as far south as Charleston. This sudden and widespread transformation of the

36   Chapter 1 carrier’s address—​­from mouthpiece of the British Empire to vox populi—​ h ­ ad both immediate and long-​­term implications for American poetry and politics. The longer history of this subgenre of political verse is registered throughout the following chapters as a consistent form for delivering annual triumphant or satiric verdicts on events from the outbreak of the Revolution to the end of War of 1812. In the more immediate context of the Stamp Act, however, the politicization of the carrier’s address had the specific effect of reinforcing an ideology in which political liberty was inexorably linked to print culture. As explicated in particular by Michael Warner, this is an ideology in which the workings of the print public sphere were identified so fully with freedom of speech, and freedom of speech with the protection of all other liberties, that the Stamp Act’s tax on printed documents was immediately and broadly understood as an assault on freedom itself: “Print had become so central to the routines of colonial life and had come so completely to be seen within the same concepts with which the political itself was thought, that the most literate classes could successfully claim that the entire realm of the public was at stake.” Against this backdrop, many colonial printers, for whom the tax also constituted a direct economic hardship, rebranded their papers as organs of anti–Stamp Act propaganda, transforming the carrier’s address into a mode of political protest. 21 There is limited evidence as to who, exactly, these early newsboy poets were. Later examples of the genre, in which the author’s identity is known (as in the case of Philip Freneau and several members of the Connecticut Wits, who frequently penned carrier’s addresses in the 1790s and 1800s) suggest that the newsboys were usually either editors or close associates of editors, and it is reasonable to assume that this was also likely the case in 1765. In at least one known example, however, the newsboy poet appears to have been an actual newspaper carrier, and named as such in the title of the verse, New Year’s Ode, for the Year 1766, Being actually dictated, by Lawrence Swinney, Carrier of News, Enemy to Stamps, a Friend to the Constitution, and an Englishman every Inch. In this poem, the carrier laments the effects of the Stamp Act on his own, already strained, economic condition—​­“I’m in Debt to the Doctors, / And never a Farthing to Pay. / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ And but little Hay for my little Horse, / And if Famine should stamp him to Death, / More than half my Fortune is gone!”—​­before ending on a decidedly political note: “What Shall I say for the Boys of New-​­York? / Happy New Years to the Sons of LIBERTY.”22 Such examples as this, while relatively rare, lent credibility to the fiction of the

The Poetics of Resistance   37 newsboy as the representative of a public that felt powerless in the face of imperial authority but was willing, nonetheless, to voice its collective protest. This is the context in which carrier’s addresses in particular, and anti– Stamp Act verse more generally, emerge as one of the many forms of politicized social ritual that characterized the period of the imperial crisis. As cultural historians of the period have shown, Stamp Act protests were highly stylized rituals for acting out symbolic narratives about the heroes, victims, and villains of the tax. The stories communicated through such rituals might be tragic or mock tragic, as in the “funeral” parades for Liberty performed in city streets, or they might center on divine or human retribution, as in the various effigy dramas in which stampmen were figuratively beaten or hanged. Similarly, poems protesting the Stamp Act constituted symbolic performances in their own right, within which fictional representatives of the vox populi roused audiences to unified resistance or addressed the king or Parliament on the people’s behalf. Like staged rituals, poems of protest could be turned into public events by being read aloud; as printed documents, however, they were not subject to limitations of time and place. A poem could be delivered by post to a neighboring town or colony, where it could be recited before an audience or reprinted, in turn, by the local newspaper editor, creating a virtually unlimited number of “revivals” of the original dramatic performance.23 As in staged protests, the Stamp Act appeared in most poems from the time as a grand symbolic or cosmic struggle, whether between liberty and tyranny or between moral innocence and malevolence. Many Stamp Act poems lent an especially threatening tone to the general mood of defiance in the colonies, as in the opening lines of the 1766 New Year’s broadside from the Boston Gazette: “May LIBERTY and FREEDOM! O blest Sound! / Survive the Stab, and heal the deep’ned Wound; / May Tyrants tremble! And may villains fear! / And spotless JUSTICE, crown the happy Year.” At the same time, it was not the case that the implicit narrative projected by most Stamp Act verses tended inexorably ­toward rebellion or revolution. Even poems like this one, which hints strongly at some form of violent retribution, concludes with a humble petition that the king will hear the pleas of the people and redress their grievances: “May GEORGE the Great, with open’d Ears and Eyes, / Observe our Injuries, and hear our Cries; / Redress the Grievance; and vouchsafe to give / Joy to us FREEMEN, who like BRITONS live.”24 Stamp Act poetry as a whole reflected this uneasy tension between expressions of moral outrage, tending t­oward a logic of rebellion, and an equally

38   Chapter 1 powerful desire for reconciliation with the Crown. This latter wish, in fact, is the common denominator in nearly all Stamp Act poems, including several that engaged in a distinct fantasy that by appealing directly to the king about their suffering under the act, the people could convince him of his error. This is the case of one poem, whose title—​­A New Collection of Verses Applied to the First of November, A.D. 1765, &c. Including a Prediction that the S‑‑‑p A‑t shall not take Place in North America—​­goes so far as to predict that the king will experience just such a change of heart before the act even takes effect. Indeed, over the course of several hundred lines, the poem presents this narrative in religious terms, beginning with a public fast in anticipation of the dreaded day: “November! gloomy Month! approaches fast / When Liberty was doom’d to brethe [sic] her last, / All, All her Sons agree to fast that Day, / To mourn, lament, and sigh, and hope,—­and pray / That Almighty GOD of all below, / Some Pity would to suffering Mortals show.” This collective prayer is heard by an angel called “the Guardian of America,” who flies to London (not to Parliament, importantly, but to St. Paul’s Cathedral) and declares from the top of the dome that a “rape” against Liberty has been committed, and that those responsible will be rightly judged for their crimes: “—​­A Rape! A Rape! / In this Life, Misery shall be your Shame, / And bitter Execrations load your Name. / Impartial Pages shall report your Case, / And curse your Memories with just Disgrace.” After a lengthy speech in which the Guardian of America chastises Mother Britain for refusing to hear her children’s pleas, Britain relents, and the angel returns to announce, “The King and Parliament have heard my Voice: / . . . ​/ The Stamp’s repeal’d!” And the repeal, importantly, leads not merely to a return to the status quo ante but to something more closely resembling a transformation of the social order itself, as members of all classes, races, and religions join in celebration: The Lads commix, and Sectaries combine In Love and Union to the Powers divine. Old Light and New forget to disagree, And each enjoy the Fruits of Charity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ​ The Sick forget to groan, the Poor to beg; The Cripple dances on his wooden Leg. The Blacks rejoice, the Indians gravely smile; The daily Labourers forget their Toil.25

The Poetics of Resistance   39 Beyond depicting the rejoicing public as a decidedly humble body of poor, disabled, and racially marginalized figures, the conclusion is significant for the celebration itself, which might well cause this poem to be mistaken for one of the many verses published after the repeal of the Stamp Act. Yet this collection was published well before the news of the repeal ever reached America, which helps explain, in turn, how poets could come to see themselves as agents in the historical process. For at least a brief moment between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the imposition of the new Townshend duties, the literary fantasy that the king could be convinced of his errors seemed to be confirmed in reality. Indeed, actual celebrations of the repeal of the act in 1766, with fireworks and the tolling of bells, seemed to mimic the happy ending imagined in such poems, and carrier’s addresses published in the wake of the repeal included reminders of their successful defiance during the crisis: “When SLAV’RY to our Shore had crept, / And other TYPES in Silence slept; I, dauntless for my Country’s Good, / The ARBITRARY ACT withstood: / I brought your News, the Rest neglect you, / A certain sign, I most RESPECT you.” As the pun on “types” makes clear, this is a statement about one newspaper’s commitment to the resistance, but its point extends to anyone charged with addressing the public in a time of political crisis. For this speaker, the Stamp Act constituted a crucial test of whether one would resist the forces of “slavery” or remain silent; whether a printer or poet passed that test suggested that he could be trusted in the event of the next crisis, which would soon come.26 If the carrier’s address represented a consciously populist mode of poetic resistance, its high literary counterpart might be termed the “satire of the times.” This is a genre that also appeared spontaneously in 1765, in the form of the two lengthiest anti–Stamp Act poems, The Times. A Poem, published anonymously by Boston physician Benjamin Church, and the still-​­anonymous Oppression. A Poem. By an American. With Notes, by a North Briton. Besides their length, what set these works apart from other Stamp Act verses was the ideological significance communicated through their form; in contrast to the informal and occasional verse tradition to which the newsboy’s addresses belonged, these works consciously announced themselves as part of the Augustan satiric tradition that had reached its apex in 1730s and 1740s Britain in the poetry of Alexander Pope, Edward Young, and others, and which had continued into the 1760s in the works of Charles Churchill. Befitting this

40   Chapter 1 tradition, The Times and Oppression: A Poem responded to the Stamp Act crisis in consciously transatlantic or imperial terms, recounting the history of Britain as a narrative of ongoing political corruption and satiric response, first by Pope and Young, and then by Churchill, who also addressed Parliamentary impositions on the liberties of those Britons who represented the political opposition. Within this narrative, the Stamp Act crisis appeared as merely the most recent of such impositions, the latest in a half-​­century-​­long history of political abuse. The extent to which Oppression: A Poem calls to mind a transatlantic ­literary-​­political opposition is evident, first and foremost, in the circumstances of its publication. Though the poem’s subtitle identifies the author as “an American,” the poem was first published in London in 1765 before being reprinted the same year in Boston and New York, thus addressing not only outraged Americans but the considerable number of Britons already inclined to sympathize with their American countrymen. A similar point is made in the reference to “Notes, by a North Briton,” which readers would immediately recognize as referring to the Opposition newspaper, the North Briton, published by John Wilkes and edited by Churchill. Throughout its publication in 1762 and 1763, the North Briton had repeatedly charged that the court and Parliament had come under the control of a corrupt cabal of Scots (or North Britons), led by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, who was accused of manipulating the king into imposing policies that opposed the people’s interests. Similarly, the author of Oppression: A Poem singles out Bute and his prime ministerial successor, George Grenville, as masterminds of a twofold assault against true English liberty—​­the Stamp Act on the one hand and, on the other, Wilkes’s 1763 arrest and expulsion from Parliament for seditious libel—​­a charge that arose specifically from his publication of the North Briton, No. 45, for which he had become an international symbol of the struggle to defend British liberty against government coercion.27 That the author of Oppression: A Poem understood his work as belonging to a decades-​­long tradition of satiric resistance is announced as well in the poem’s opening lines. For while the poem directs its satire most explicitly at the Stamp Act, it presents the crisis as part of a problem of government corruption that has plagued Britain since at least the 1720s, and it does so, importantly, through of a series of allusions to several well-​­known eighteenth-​­century satires:

The Poetics of Resistance   41 WHEN private faith and public trusts are sold,

And traitors barter liberty for gold: When giant-​­vice and irreligion rise, On mountain’d falsehoods to invade the skies: When fell corruption, dark and deep, like fate, Saps the foundation of our happy state: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When tyrants skulk behind a gracious T[hrone], And practice what,—​­their courage dare not own; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When countries groan beneath Oppression’s hand, And pension’d blockheads riot through the land: When COLONIES a savage Ex—​­se pay, To feed the creatures of a motly [sic] day: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ​ When all these ills, thousands yet untold, Destroy our liberty, and rob our gold, Should not then SATIRE bite with all its rage, And just resentment glow through ev’ry page? The most obvious allusion in this passage is to John Brown’s Essay on Satire (1744), a work purporting to teach poets not only the art of effective satire but also, and more important, when in the course of a society’s moral or political decline it becomes necessary to speak back in the acerbic tones of satire. Indeed, the passage from Oppression quotes Brown directly on this question: “When fell corruption, dark and deep, like fate, / Saps the foundation of a sinking state; / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ Then warmer numbers glow through satire’s page, / And all her smiles are darken’d into rage.” Implicit in Oppression’s tribute to Brown (as well as in Brown’s tribute in his poem to Pope), is a reminder of the literary warfare simultaneously waged in many of the satiric masterpieces of the 1720s—​­The Dunciad, Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera—​­against the Parliamentary dishonesty, bribery, and fraud associated with the government of First Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Embedded in the very name given to this literary period—​­the Augustan Age—​­stood the anxious possibility that, if left to itself, political corruption would spread through all segments of society, leading, as in ancient Rome, to the decline and fall of

42   Chapter 1 a once virtuous and prosperous society. The purpose of the poem, accordingly, is to intervene in this process of moral or political decline before it reaches the point of no return. Within this narrative, the satirist addresses the reader not (as in the carrier’s address) as a representative voice of the people but as its moral guardian.28 The opening lines of Benjamin Church’s The Times identifies the same transatlantic literary opposition to Bute and Grenville, this time by alluding to the poetry of Charles Churchill, Wilkes’s collaborator who had, in the years immediately prior to the Stamp Act, produced a string of social and political satires (including a poem also entitled The Times). Church opens his own version of The Times with a eulogy to the recently deceased Churchill and a humble comparison of his own “rough” verse to that of his English precursor: “ ’Tis not great Churchill’s ghost who claims your ear, / For even ghosts of wit are strangers here; / That patriot-​­soul to other climes remov’d, / Well-​­pleas’d enjoys that liberty he lov’d.”29 Yet despite this gesture of contrast, the point here and throughout the poem is that Church and Churchill belong to a common satiric alliance, and their poems, appearing at nearly the same moment on opposite sides of the Atlantic, stand as twin defenses of liberty against those who would usurp it for their narrow ends. This is why both The Times and Oppression: A Poem make the point of emphasizing the ideological union between those who denied Wilkes the freedom to criticize his government and those who advocated excise, whether in Britain or America. Thus Church, writing in America, takes aim not only at Bute and his associates at the center of imperial power but also at men like Jared Ingersoll, a notorious Boston stampman accused of enriching himself at the expense of his countrymen. Similarly, the anonymous “American” author of Oppression, writing from London, devotes a significant part of his poem to attacking one John Huske, a New Hampshire native who returned to England to become a member of Parliament. Huske was commonly accused of being one of the architects of the Stamp Act and in fact was hanged in effigy on the Liberty Tree alongside Lord Grenville on the day the act took effect. This shared sense of literary alliance explains why both The Times and Oppression: A Poem echo the charge first made by Churchill in The Farewell—​­that this collection of ambitious placemen and corrupt ministers, besides restraining the people’s liberty, also undermined the king’s authority by driving a wedge between him and his subjects. Such men, Churchill warned, are nothing more

The Poetics of Resistance   43 than “Arch, subtle Hypocrites,” who, “with arts to honest men unknown, / Breed doubts between the People and the Throne.” The same verdict is delivered by Church in the more severe form of direct accusation: “Behold your crimes, and tremblingly await / The grumbling thunder of your country’s hate; / Accursed as ye are! how durst ye bring / An injur’d people to distrust their K[ing]?”30 Corresponding to this struggle pitting the king and his subjects against a narrow coterie of conniving ministers was a perceived literary conflict between the forces of satire and those of “panegyric,” with the latter representing writers who would pander to corrupt leaders even in a time of crisis. This, too, was a well-​­established Augustan motif, as seen, for instance, in Edward Young’s rhetorical question from Love of Fame, the Universal Passion: “When flatter’d crimes of a licentious age / Reproach our silence, and demand our rage,” he asks, “Shall panegyric reign, and Censure cease?” Church has this same symbolic opposition in mind when he contrasts the recent past—​­a time when the muse “Instructed, rul’d, corrected”—​­with the present “degenerate” age in which the muse “stuns me with the clamour of her praise: / Is there a villain eminent in State, / Without one gleam of merit?—​­She’ll create; / Is there a scoundrel, has that scoundrel gold? / There the full tide of panegyrick’s roll’d.” The danger of panegyric is that it is meant to please, which, in times of moral or political corruption, requires readers to accept an inverted reality. To assume such a perspective at the present moment, Church witheringly puts it, requires that one believe not only that “The STAMP, and LAND-​­TAX are as blessings meant” but also “That where we are not, we most surely are, / That wrong is right, black white, and foul is fair; / That M[a]nsf[ie]ld’s honest, and that Pitt’s a knave, / That Pratt’s a villain, and that Wilkes’s a slave.”31 Within this shared sense of satiric struggle, importantly, the outcome of the Stamp Act crisis remained precariously open-​­ended. One possible outcome was the one imagined in poems emphasizing reconciliation, with the king awakening to the realization that he has been misled and recommitting himself to acting on behalf of the people. The other was that this latest round of satiric warfare would, as in earlier decades, fail to stem the tide of political corruption and oppression, leading the crisis to fester to the point of outright rebellion. Indeed, this prospect is strongly hinted at in Oppression: A Poem in a passage that explains, somewhat threateningly, the origin of past political revolutions:

44   Chapter 1 Ever ye’ll find, when nations have rebell’d, Thro’ fell Oppression they have been compell’d. When civil discord, shakes the props of state, And wild distraction howls with deadly hate; When from the Royal head the crown is torn, And on the front of some usurper born; When frightful horror glares in ev’ry street, And friends with friends in dreadful battle meet; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Know then the cause! Oppression lawless reign’d, And ev’ry right with liberty was chain’d; Revenge at last, a horrid war prepar’d, And high and low her deadly fury shar’d, Till righteous rage had pull’d the monster down, And made the subject, happy as the crown.32 Notwithstanding its transatlantic publication and self-​­conscious identification with the British satiric tradition, this is as close as any poem would come in 1765 to imagining something like the American Revolution. Nor should this surprise us, for embedded in its narrative of corruption and satire is the same moral logic of independence that would lead colonial pamphleteers to argue that the only hope for the preservation of public virtue would be for the colonies to cut themselves off from the corrupt British Empire before it reached a point of inevitable collapse.33 Despite their formal differences, both major strains of anti–Stamp Act verse—​­the carrier’s address and the high-​­Augustan satire of the times—​­appealed to this logic through a shared set of assumptions about the role of poetry as an agent in history. Whether by giving voice to a public that was coming into consciousness of itself as a political agent or by laying bare the degree to which political reality had diverged from a self-​­evident standard of truth or virtue, political poetry in 1765 presented itself as a means of awakening society and its leaders to otherwise unseen historical consequences. While such strains functioned in a complementary manner in the context of the Stamp Act crisis, this would not remain the case during the Revolution. Amid the struggle between competing authoritative texts demanding implicit assent from the public—​­royal proclamations on one side and declarations by the Congress on the other—​­the two forms would come into conflict. Poets

The Poetics of Resistance   45 representing the so-​­called Patriot movement would draw more often on the populist strain of political verse to counter the commands of British generals, while Loyalist poets would be more likely to respond to acts of Congress in the impersonal voice of high Augustanism in the name of restoring order to a world turned upside down. Yet both types of response would arise from a shared sense of poetry as a unique mode of political intervention, which originated, in turn, from poetry’s capacity to highlight, reinterpret, and circumscribe the language of politics.

Tit for Tat: Songs and Poems on the Townshend Duties If the repeal of the Stamp Act was met with poems of celebration and thanksgiving in the North American colonies, in Britain, not surprisingly, the literary response was decidedly more skeptical. Though some London newspapers published poetry expressing sympathy for the colonial protesters, and even reprinted a few anti–Stamp Act songs in their pages, most British poets responded to the resistance as a dishonest attempt by colonial subjects to avoid contributing to their own protection. In the wake of the act’s repeal, moreover, British balladeers cast the episode as a case of provincials having engineered a bargain for themselves more favorable than that of their British countrymen. Thus, in a song whose title describes the repeal as a zero-​­sum game—​­“America Triumphant; or Old England’s Downfall”—​­the singer introduces a motif that will reappear in countless British and Tory poems, that the leaders of the resistance are fundamentally dishonest: “The Americans no burthens bear, / But, laughing in their sleeves, / Most wittily have shewn us, / They’re still a land of thieves.”34 After the Stamp Act crisis gave way to the controversy over the Townshend duties, American Whigs were increasingly vulnerable to such attacks as this because, unlike the Stamp Act’s tax on printed materials, which could be framed as an assault on the protections of liberty, the new taxes on glass, tea, and other imports did not easily lend themselves to such an interpretation. Yet even in the absence of this connection, there was sufficient momentum for representing what was on its face an economic issue as a political and ideological one. In the first place, the Commissioners of Customs Act called for the appointment of new salaried officers who answered not to the people of the colonies but to Parliament, what the author of Oppression had called the “pension’d servile herd.” This raised questions, in turn, of whence, precisely, Parliament derived

46   Chapter 1 its authority to tax and whether such duties violated the constitution’s protection against depriving subjects of liberty or property without their consent—​ ­ hat would before long be rendered in shorthand as “taxation without w representation.” The latter argument was put forth by John Dickinson in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which interpreted the new duties as an infringement of constitutional rights but did so somewhat delicately, rejecting the passionate rhetoric of the Stamp Act protests in favor of advocating what he called “constitutional methods of seeking Redress” (such as nonimportation agreements). Yet even as the Letters opted not to speak to the general sense of resentment over the Townshend Acts, Dickinson himself soon offset this gesture of rhetorical restraint by penning his other celebrated work from the period, “The Liberty Song.”35 The circumstances behind the song’s composition are well known, but they are worth recounting because they again illustrate the degree to which the imperial Crisis was experienced as a conflict between competing authoritative texts: in February 1768, the Massachusetts House of Representatives published its Circular Letter to the legislatures of the other colonies, calling for intercolonial cooperation in determining their response to the duties. The Circular Letter reaffirmed Dickinson’s argument in the Letters from a Farmer, stating, “It is an essential, unalterable right in nature, engrafted into the British constitution, as a fundamental law, . . . ​that what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken away from him without his consent.” The argument itself did not strike as much of a nerve among Lord Hillsborough’s newly created “colonial department” as the possibility of another round of protests spreading from colony to colony. Accordingly, Hillsborough issued an order to Governor Francis Bernard: force the House to rescind the Circular Letter or dissolve the body altogether. On June 30, the House refused to rescind by a vote of ninety-​­two to seventeen—​­a tally that would itself become a symbol of the liberty movement, as countless newspaper articles, broadsides, songs, and poems would praise the courage of the “Massachusetts Ninety-​­Two”—​­and the following day, the governor dissolved the assembly. Not long after, James Otis received a letter from Dickinson enclosing a “song for American freedom,” which soon appeared as a broadside under the title “A New Song, to the Tune of Hearts of Oak,” but which soon came to be known as “The Liberty Song.”36 “The Liberty Song” has been described as an eighteenth-​­century precursor to a modern hit song, reprinted in newspapers and broadsides throughout

The Poetics of Resistance   47 North America and sung at Liberty Tree ceremonies and gatherings of political organizations. It even generated its status as a subgenre, spawning numerous imitations of its form and themes. The song’s political power arose in part from the power of drinking songs in general—​­allowing the participants, as Kenneth Silverman put it, “to experience directly the strength in unity.” At a time of political controversy, this capacity to be publicly and unisonally voiced was crucial, for it took the already emergent sense of the poem as an embodiment of the vox populi to another level entirely in the form of a rousing chorus of voices vowing to defend their collective liberty. Newspaper accounts from 1768 confirm precisely this function, describing political gatherings rich in dramatic and symbolic significance, which culminated in the singing of what was nearly always referred to as the “celebrated” “Liberty Song.”37 Beyond the symbolism of the performance, Dickinson’s choice of the tune contributed to the spirit of unified resistance: William Boyce’s “Heart of Oak,” which was written in commemoration of several key naval battles in the Seven Years’ War (and which remains today the official song of the Royal Navy). Even the martial imagery and defiant tone of the original lyrics—​­with recurring phrases, such as “We’ll fight and we’ll conquer” and “Britannia ­triumphant”—​­were easily transposed into a new political context in Dickinson’s version: COME join hand in hand, brave AMERICANS all,

And rouse your bold hearts at fair LIBERTY’s call; No tyrannous Acts, shall suppress your just Claim, Or stain with Dishonor AMERICA’s name. In FREEDOM we’re BORN, and in FREEDOM we’ll LIVE; Our Purses are ready, Steady, Friends, steady, Not as SLAVES but as FREEMEN our money we’ll give.38 Like other American responses to the Townshend Acts, “The Liberty Song” couches the act of protesting the taxes in the common discourse of Whig ideology, representing colonial resistance as a defense against tyranny and thus, paradoxically, a “support of our laws.” At the same time, in contrast to much anti–Townshend Act literature, which treated the issue of taxation indirectly (by way of abstract or legal language, such as “injustice” or “arbitrary laws”), Dickinson does not shy away from the economic dimension of

48   Chapter 1 the controversy, directly referencing “Purses,” “Money,” and the right of property in the refrain, and openly praising America’s colonial forefathers for pursuing their own economic self-​­interest so that their “Children can gather the Fruits of [their] Pain.” By this same logic, the song goes on to say, to give up one’s profits to tax collectors is tantamount to surrendering one’s birthright: “Their generous Bosoms all Dangers despis’d, / So highly, so wisely, their BIRTHRIGHTS they priz’d; / We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep, / Nor frustrate their Toils on the Land or the Deep.” 39 While the success of the song may attest to Dickinson’s skill in drawing the economic issues of the Townshend Acts into the broader ideology of liberty, this same tactic would leave the song vulnerable to a satiric counterattack charging that the discourse of liberty, when applied to the Townshend duties, amounted to merely a pretense for individual self-​­interest. This is the satiric point of “A Parody of a Well-​­Known Liberty Song,” which appeared a few weeks later, recasting those whom Dickinson deemed brave defenders of liberty as an enraged mob of scoundrels who stand for nothing but a willingness to take what they can from their moral and social betters: Come shake your dull Noddles, ye Pumpkins and bawl, And own that you’re mad at fair Liberty’s Call; No scandalous Conduct can add to your Shame, Condemn’d to Dishonor. Inherit the Fame — In Folly you’re born, and in Folly you’ll live, To Madness still ready, And Stupidly steady, Not as Men, but as Monkies [sic], the Tokens you give. The sheer number of distinct attacks, both in this passage and throughout the “Parody,” is staggering: the Sons of Liberty are lowly, envious, mad, and unscrupulous; in the verses to follow, they are described as “vile Rascalls” willing to steal whatever “Chattels and Goods” they can get their hands on, and as knaves who justify such theft by railing against the “insolent Rich.” Though the determination by the leaders of the resistance is, on the one hand, dismissed as a sort of ideological stupor (as in the phrase “Stupidly steady”), more often it is unmasked as a sham, an excuse for “Reaping what other men sow.”40 It is this latter critique that will prove particularly significant not only within the “Liberty Song” exchange but also within the larger history of liter-

The Poetics of Resistance   49 ary warfare in the Revolution and after. The charge that the Sons of Liberty amounted to a pack of thieves directly countered the main argument of Dickinson’s original “Liberty Song,” that the new taxes themselves amounted to a form of theft. Thus did the dynamic of this exchange anticipate one of the crucial conventions of political verse more broadly—​­to transform or negate the ideological content of an opposing work of political verse by circumscribing it within a new ideological narrative. Beyond the arguments advanced, moreover, the “Parody” accomplishes its counterdiscursive strategy through its form, as a rival song. For notwithstanding its title, the song is not strictly a parody: it imitates the poetic and musical form of “The Liberty Song” but not its voice or speaker. Its ideological power arises from its invocation of a rival chorus—​­the “we” who speak back to the “you” of the mob—​­which calls into being an unacknowledged segment of the public that disagrees with the original song’s assertion of united resistance to the Townshend Acts. From the perspective of the “Parody,” the public invoked by “The Liberty Song” is an unrepresentative segment of the British American public, and in making this claim, the “Parody” projects a fundamentally different political meaning onto the conflict as a whole. In place of the original dynamic, which pitted “the people” against a group of corrupt ministers and placemen, the implicit dynamic of the “Parody” pits two parties against each other, thus recasting Dickinson’s own song as a representation not of widespread popular protest but of mere factional rivalry. More remarkable still, the circumstances of the publication of the “Parody” reveal additional layers of ideological import. For the song appeared not, as one might expect, in a British or Loyalist newspaper but in the Boston Gazette, whose editors, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, would become leading advocates of the Patriot cause. In addition, the song appeared under the heading “Last Tuesday the following Song made its Appearance from a Garret at C‑st‑e W‑‑‑‑‑m [Castle William].” Referring to the military garrison on Castle Island in Boston Harbor, the introduction explicitly attributes the song to one or more of the British soldiers stationed there. Whether or not this suggestion was accurate, in casting the “Parody” in this way, Edes and Gill transformed the song’s meaning once again, turning the throng of voices ostensibly undisturbed by the Townshend duties into a small cadre of occupying soldiers. In this new context, the song’s treatment of the Sons of Liberty appears as an example of British condescension t­oward colonial Americans. (This insinuation may have struck a nerve among the soldiers in the garrison, because in

50   Chapter 1 the same issue of the Gazette in which the song appears, one Henry Hulton wrote to the editors from Castle William, formally disavowing authorship of the song.) 41 Thus, even as the parody’s own lyrics project the dynamic of the conflict as one of opposing parties within the colonies, the context surrounding its publication in the Gazette undercuts this claim and reasserts a version of the original binary opposition projected by “The Liberty Song,” with “the people” on one side and the occupying army on the other. Perhaps inspired by the subtlety of this maneuver to negate the ideological force of the “Parody,” another song, “The Parody Parodized,” appeared in the Gazette the following week. As with the “Parody,” the “Parody Parodized” took aim at the rival chorus projected by its immediate precursor, portraying this chorus as an insignificant “Tory” minority: “COME swallow your Bumpers, ye Tories! and roar, / That the sons of fair FREEDOM are hamper’d once more.” Against this sentiment, not surprisingly, the “sons of fair FREEDOM” repeat many of the assertions of Dickinson’s original—­that their spirits will not be hampered by “Cut-​­throats” or “Oppressors” and that they will gladly risk their lives to defend their liberty. The function of “The Parody Parodized” is to wrest from its predecessor any claim to represent the voice of the people, and then to assert the same claim through the performance of the song: “Then join hand in hand, brave AMERICANS all, / To be free, is to live; to be slaves is to fall; / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ . . . ​/ In Freedom we’re born, and, like SONS of the brave, /Will never surrender, /But swear to defend her, / And scorn to survive, if unable to save.”42 Though “The Liberty Song” was probably the most popular example of literary resistance to the Townshend Acts, it was far from the only one. Another well-​­known poem of protest—​­composed, coincidentally, by John Dickinson’s cousin by marriage, Hannah Griffits—​­was “The Female Patriots,” which is remembered today as one of relatively few works of political verse published by a woman during the entire Revolutionary period. And indeed, its unique contribution to the resistance movement originates from its character as a self-​­consciously gendered poem. First and foremost, “The Female Patriots” insists that women play a vital role in the movement because their otherwise limited power over domestic matters gives them considerable input over whether or not to support a boycott against tea, sugar, or imported fabrics. Beyond this, as the title suggests, the poem is important for its introduction into pre-​­Revolutionary culture another symbolic embodiment of the vox populi ideal—​­the female patriot, who speaks back not only to the administra-

The Poetics of Resistance   51 tion in Britain but also to American men whose own commitment to the boycott may be less than resolute. This latter function is suggested most immediately by the poem’s subtitle, which states that it is “Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty in America”—​­a phrase implying quasi-​­official status, as if the poem’s primary audience is a sort of organized political body, a female counterpart to the Sons of Liberty. The poem as a whole likewise functions as a call to action, arising from a stated deficiency of determination among those in power—​­men who “from Party, or Fear of a Frown” have been kept “quietly down, / Supinely asleep—​­and depriv’d of their Sight.” If these “degenerate” sons refuse to guard the rights and freedom of colonial Americans, the speaker exclaims, “Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise.”43 The paradox surrounding this act of voicing female patriotism is that, as the speaker also acknowledges, when it comes to deciding how to respond to the Townshend duties, “we’ve no Voice but a Negative here”—​­for the political agency of women arises only from their power to “forbear” from consuming “Taxables” like tea, glass, and paint. Yet it is precisely the marginalization of the female patriots from power that allows them—​­as we also saw in the case of the humble newsboys—​­to lay claim to more accurately representing the people at large. By emphasizing women’s power of forbearance, moreover, the speaker is also able to assert the traditionally “masculine” ideal of republican virtue, that of sacrificing one’s personal self-​­interest for the public good and eschewing what was frequently described in protest pamphlets as an “effeminate” desire for luxury. As Griffits’s speaker argues, by living according to these republican values, even within the confines of the domestic sphere, female patriots possess a powerful retort to certain male counterparts who, either out of weakness or self-​­interest, seek to silence women’s protests: “Thus acting—​ ­we point out their Duty to Men; / And should the Bound-​­Pensioners tell us to hush, / We can throw back the Satire, by bidding them blush.”44 No doubt inspired by Griffits’s poem, the iconic figure of the female ­patriot—​­whose fidelity to the resistance movement was measured by her willingness to deny herself such luxuries as tea and fine linen—​­would become a subject of frequent poetic musings throughout the period of the Townshend Acts crisis. Appearing several months after Griffits’s “Female Patriots” was the similarly entitled anonymous broadside The Female Patriot, No. 1—​­which, in contrast to Griffits’s address to the Daughters of Liberty, is addressed “To the Tea-​­Drinking Ladies of New York.” In place of Griffits’s call for female solidarity as a corrective to male wavering, moreover, this poem directs its satire

52   Chapter 1 t­oward women, presenting them as obstacles to their husbands’ efforts to honor the boycott: thus, in response to her husband’s refusal to participate in the importation of tea, the shrewish wife depicted in the poem beats him with her broomstick, exclaiming, “Go, dirty CLOD-​­POLE! get me some Shushong, / This Evening I’ve invited MADAM STRONG.”45 However misogynistic in its satire, The Female Patriot, No. 1, raised questions about women’s involvement in the boycott that would be taken up as a crucial motif in political verse written by women during the crisis. Griffits herself would in 1775 pen a fictional poetic exchange pitting “Fidelia,” who calls on women to join her in boycotting East India Company tea, against “Europa,” a clearly satirized figure who curses the “hideous wild uproar” brought on by Congress’s nonimportation pact and declares, “Tea I must have, or I shall dye.” In the same vein, Mercy Otis Warren would publish several poems on the tea boycott, including a satire against women who complain about having to give up what they call “necessities” but what the poem’s voice of moral conscience derides as “useless vanities of life.” 46 As in the imand-​­ forth exchange between the conflicting “Female Patriot” plied back-​­ poems, these poems and groups of poems followed a binary structure in which a satirized voice—​­one who complains about the inconvenience of political action—​­is opposed by that of a self-​­proclaimed patriot. By consistently favoring the latter argument, such poems allowed complaints about the boycott to be aired but then circumscribed within a moral framework that served to police illicit consumption of taxable goods at a moment when the political leverage of the resistance depended largely on the success of the boycotts. In all of these examples, poetry and song gave voice to the resistance to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, and it did so according to what I have described as a poetics of resistance—​­a set of literary practices and conventions that arose in response to the circumstances of the crises themselves. The first of these—​­seen in the newsboy verses and then in the “Liberty Song” and “The Female Patriot”—​­is the consistent act of connecting the poetic voice to the voice of the people. This would continue as a mainstay of poetic warfare in the ensuing decades, with poems and songs giving voice to these and other symbolic manifestations of the vox populi. In positive or concrete form, the voice of the people would be represented by a variety of symbolic figures speaking back to various institutions of authority, from the humble soldier asking for a fairer system of compensation for Revolutionary War veterans in the 1790s to the “honest tar” of 1807 who rails against the em-

The Poetics of Resistance   53 bargo as an impractical policy dreamed up by elite politicians. At the same time, as seen in the versification vogue, the voice of the people could also be expressed in a purely negative or critical mode, as the invisible agent that draws on the transformative power of parody to register the public’s rejection of a governmental directive. Another important element of the poetics of resistance, as seen in the allusions to Pope, Swift, Young, and Churchill, is the implicit conviction that poetic resistance had always been transatlantic in nature. From the time of Sir Robert Walpole to that of Bute and Grenville, poets had turned to satire to as a means of articulating political conflicts in moral terms, and they had done so, importantly, in full consciousness of belonging to a tradition of satiric opposition. This transatlantic (and later, transnational) political verse tradition will pervade the poetry wars of the Revolution, with Patriot and Loyalist poets alike invoking Milton, Pope, Butler, and others to expose the moral deficiencies of their political opponents, and poets representing the emerging proto-​­parties of the 1790s warring over which side comprised the true legacy of this literary-​­political tradition. Implicit in the act of allusion is a conception of poetic utterance as fundamentally intertextual—​­the notion that a poem’s meaning is not intrinsic to itself but depends in a fundamental way on its connections and resonances with other texts—​­and it is this aspect, I want to argue, that will constitute the crucial element of the poetics of resistance as it will develop after 1765. This is the notion of poetry as a form of discursive retaliation, evident in the tit-​­for-​­tat dynamic of the “Liberty Song” and “Female Patriot” exchanges, and culminating in the anti-​­Gage versifications as a strategy for contesting political legitimacy itself. The power of a poem in retaliation will derive from its capacity to impose a new narrative onto public discourse itself as it is mediating history as it unfolds. This is why, as we shall see, poets during the Revolution will understand their respective acts of literary-​­political subversion not merely as commenting on political issues so much as shaping or altering political reality. The same assumption that cleared space for the versification vogue of 1774 will continue to embolden Patriot versifiers to recast the directives of British military leaders as mere linguistic performances, devoid of any power to control the actions of colonial subjects. They will also inspire Loyalist poets to try to nullify in verse the authority of the popular declarations issued by the “upstart” Congress. Such literary exchanges, moreover, will be seen to unfold chronologically, often in a dialectical relationship with the major events of the war as

54   Chapter 1 they are being reported in the same newspapers. Within this atmosphere, the narrative of the war itself—​­battles fought, territory gained or lost—​­will frequently merge with the various narratives generated by literary attacks and retaliations, such that a virtual triumph by a poet or balladeer will seem to prefigure, or even help to bring about, a corresponding actual triumph on the battlefield. Such blurring of literary and political reality will create space for the emergence of a fantasy about poetry’s ability to affect the outcome of a struggle not merely between opposing texts but even opposing armies.

Chapter 2

h War and Literary War T

he proliferation of verse parodies of Gage’s proclamations arose, as we have seen, from the audacious notion that, by blocking the legal or authoritative claims by a certain class of printed documents, poetry had the capacity to intervene in the domain of real power. This belief appeared to be borne out by the events surrounding Gage’s own tenure as governor, as the inability of his directives to keep order in Boston not only led to his dismissal but also opened space for counterclaims to political authority by the Congress. At the same time, from the summer of 1775 onward, this textual struggle was taking place alongside a full-​­fledged military struggle whose uncertain outcome had the potential to confound or contradict authorial intentions. Poets could control the metanarratives surrounding their satiric engagement with official proclamations or rival poems, but however much they desired to, they could not really control the outcome of the war. Or could they? As recent studies by William B. Warner and Carroll Smith-​ ­Rosenberg illustrate, Americans of the Revolutionary era lived amid a dynamic media environment in which events and print mediations of events unfolded together in continuous dialogue with each other.1 Within this atmosphere, categories such as news as event and news as representation at times blurred into each other in such a way as to lend agency to the latter. As reports of news events appeared in the same newspapers as other texts—​­including, significantly, poetic responses to those events—​­over a succession of weeks, such mediations often coalesced into larger media narratives in which poems appeared to play more than an indirect role in their ultimate outcomes. As we shall see in the first episode analyzed in this chapter, the appearance of a

56   Chapter 2 strategically placed versification of a hostile proclamation by General Burgoyne could appear as a crucial step in his ultimate downfall at Saratoga. And this same assumption would inform other episodes of literary-​­political convergence as well: at the moment the Congress’s viability as a governing body was being tested, its members would petition John Trumbull to compose a poem to undermine British imperial claims, while the Loyalist poet, Jonathan Odell, would attempt to negate through satire that same Congress’s most momentous act, of declaring independence. Yet if the existence of an independent American nation posed one kind of problem for Loyalists, it also raised a crucial question for those supporting of the so-​­called Patriot movement: namely, what sort of patria was implied by that label. Revolutionary American poets who expressed their total allegiance to an independent republic, as we saw in Chapter 1, had come of age in an era in which political resistance had always been framed in terms of a single empire. Issues surrounding a distinct American political identity had scarcely arisen. Even when the outbreak of war and the Declaration of Independence redefined the conflict as necessarily two-​­sided, Patriot poets were reluctant to give up the idea of literary resistance against a single, imperial entity. American war ballads focused less on celebrating the martial prowess of American soldiers than on exposing the failure of their British opponents to live up to their vaunted reputation, and Patriot verse as a whole was marked by a tendency to evade the issue of American identity. It is fitting, in this context, that the most renowned and reprinted poem of the Revolution was not some grand epic of national unity but a mock-​­epic treatment of the ideological dismantling of British America: John Trumbull’s M’Fingal. Yet perhaps for this very reason, Trumbull would be among the first to register that the very success of the Revolution meant asking a series of potentially troubling questions about what kind of nation had been created in its aftermath.

The Poetic Defeat of John Burgoyne As the newly minted Continental Army was gearing up for its first major contest—​­transporting artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights to aid in the siege of Boston—​­the proclamation war that had begun during Thomas Gage’s governorship continued unabated. William Howe, who suc-

War and Literary War   57 ceeded Gage in late 1775 as commander of His Majesty’s North American forces, issued a string of proclamations attempting to regulate the movement of Bostonians, at least one of which was versified by an anonymous wit. At the same time, the more important challenge to the governor’s authority that winter came from a rival proclamation by the General Court of Massachusetts-​ ­ ay, establishing a functioning provincial government, with an executive, a B judiciary, and an active military force, whose “power” was declared to “reside . . . ​in the body of the people.” This dynamic would be replicated in colony after colony in 1776 and 1777, with remaining royal governors and newly established colonial authorities speaking past each other in proclamations, resolutions, and manifestos competing for the public’s assent, at least until the outcome of the war—​­the ultimate arbiter of political disputes—​­determined the actual limits of power. In the meantime, the Revolution would be fought to an important degree in print, as in the following representative exchange from June 1776, when the Loyalist governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, put out a proclamation calling for a meeting of the General Assembly, only to be answered by a “Resolution” of the Provincial Congress demanding that Franklin’s order to be ignored. That the Resolution was reprinted in newspapers in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at the very moment the Congress was deliberating over declaring independence reinforces the sense that such exchanges amounted to more than mere performances of political resolve.2 It might be expected that this new atmosphere of contested legal authority would signal an end of the popularity of the versification, which had always communicated simple resistance, as opposed to advancing a rival claim, to political power. And though the fashion for parodying official language in verse waned after 1776, it did not disappear entirely. In fact, the most famous example of the genre appeared in the summer of 1777, in response to an equally famous, or infamous, proclamation issued by General Burgoyne in the months prior to the Battle of Saratoga. The story of the battle and its importance for the outcome of the war is well known: Burgoyne had spent the previous winter lobbying Parliament to support his strategy to bring the war to a speedy end by gaining control of the Hudson from Canada to New York, which would effectively cut off New England, widely considered the epicenter of the rebellion, from the other colonies. A series of setbacks resulted in Burgyone’s army of Regulars, Hessians, and Iroquois allies finding themselves

58   Chapter 2 stalled near Saratoga, and after his request for reinforcements from New York went unheeded, “Gentleman Johnnie” was forced to surrender his entire force. When news of the American victory reached Paris a few months later, it served as a prime motivator for France’s decision to enter the war. Saratoga indeed proved a crucial turning point in the war, though not in the way Burgoyne had imagined it.3 Beyond its military significance, the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga carried enormous symbolic weight, which was owed largely to the proclamation he issued as his army was pushing southward. Insisting that His Majesty’s forces were unstoppable, and threatening to destroy anyone who would hinder their progress, the proclamation was steeped in what critics derided as arrogance and false piety, such that when read retrospectively in light of his disastrous surrender, it appeared at best as a study in dramatic irony, and at worst as the sin that had invited divine retribution against him. Beginning with the genre’s obligatory list of titles, Burgoyne’s variation on the motif was at least as extravagant as that of his precursors: “By His EXCELLENCY JOHN BURGOYNE, Esquire, Lieutenant-​­General of his MAJESTY’s Forces in America, Colonel of the Queen’s Regiment of Light Dragoons, Governor of Fort-​­William, in North-​­Britain, one of the Representatives of the Commons of Great-​­Britain in Parliament, and commanding an Army and Fleet in an Expedition from Canada, &c. &c. &c.” The proclamation then goes on to describe Burgoyne’s mission less as a military operation than a humanitarian one: “The cause in which the British arms are thus exerted, applies to the most affecting interest of the human heart.” The aim was to defend the “suffering thousands” from the Revolutionary assemblies—​­what Burgoyne calls “the completest system of tyranny that ever GOD, in his displeasure, suffered for a time, to be exercised over a froward and stubborn generation.” He then goes on to say that as “the head of troops in the full powers of health, discipline, and valour, determined to strike where necessary, and anxious to spare where possible,” he demands the people’s full cooperation. More precisely, he announces: “I . . . ​ invite and exhort all persons, in all places . . . ​to maintain such a conduct as may justify me in protecting their lands, habitations, and families.” To the “domestic, the industrious, the infirm, and even the timid inhabitants,” he offers protection as long as they remain quietly at home. Yet to those who persist in the rebellion, he issues a menacing threat: “I have but to give stretch to the Indian forces under my direction, and they amount to thousands, to overtake the

War and Literary War   59 hardened enemies of Great-​­Britain; . . . ​I trust I shall stand acquitted in the eyes of God and men, in denouncing and executing the vengeance of the state against the willful outcast.—­The messengers of justice and of wrath await them in the field, and devastation, famine, and every concomitant horror, that a reluctant but indispensable prosecution of military duty must occasion, will bar the way to their return.”4 From the moment of its appearance in print, Burgoyne’s proclamation inspired numerous reactions, ranging from brief dismissals of his tone—​ ­“Burgoyne has issued out another pompous something (I don’t know what to call it) which may get to your hands before this”—​­to detailed analyses of his rhetoric: “Some men are pedantic, . . . ​others are foppish. . . . ​But Burgoyne’s turn, or artificial character, is that of a mountebank, in which every thing must be wonderful. In his proclamation, which has already been in most of the papers, he has handed himself out under as many titles as a High German doctor.” Others used Burgoyne’s threat to employ the “Indian forces” at his disposal to implicate him in the murder of Miss Jane McCrea, which occurred under Burgoyne’s ostensible protection a month after he issued the proclamation, and which was already becoming grist for anti-​­British and anti–Native American propaganda: “The following is Burgoyne’s pompous proclamation, under which many of the credulous have lost their scalps.” Given such responses to its rhetoric, it seems inevitable that the proclamation would be parodied in verse, and indeed it was, this time by none other than a sitting governor, William Livingston of New Jersey.5 Originally entitled simply “Proclamation,” and attributed to “A New-​ ­Jersey Man,” the poem would live on in cultural memory to become one of only two verse parodies included in Frank Moore’s influential 1856 anthology, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution. This may be due in part to the momentousness of the battle itself, which inspired numerous similar poems and songs with such titles as “The Fate of John Burgoyne” and “The Lamentations of General Burgoyne.” Yet it may also be owed to the comic brilliance of Livingston’s act of invalidating the ideological force of the original proclamation. This is nowhere more evident than in the opening lines, which capitalize on Burgoyne’s ceremonial inventory of titles to create a hilariously ridiculous character who is far from the calm, confident “gentleman” persona Burgoyne sought to project. Instead, the young general comes off as a boy so impatient for honors that he can scarcely restrain himself from blurting out all his achievements and ambitions:

60   Chapter 2 By John Burgoyne, and Burgoyne John, Esquire, And grac’d with titles still more higher, For I’m Lieutenant-​­General too, Of George’s troops both red and blue, On this extensive Continent; And of Queen Charlotte’s regiment Of eight dragoons the Colonel; And Governor eke of Castle Will; And furthermore, when I am there, In House of Commons there appear (Hoping e’er [sic] long to be a Peer) Being member of that virtuous band Who always vote at North’s command; Directing too the fleets and troops From Canada as thick as hops; And all my titles to display, I’ll end with thrice etcaetera. This passage executes its strategy of satiric diminishment of the original document through multiple poetic techniques: the breakneck pace of the tetrameter lines, the repetition of additives, such as “and,” “too,” and “eke,” and the triplet rhyme (there/appear/peer), which dramatizes a speaker who is utterly incapable of controlling himself as he frantically rehearses his pedigree. Such emphasis on exaggeration introduces, in turn, the charge of Burgoyne’s dishonesty, which will be further developed in later passages, such as when Burgoyne insists that his mission is one of benevolence, to save the people of New York from the “tyranny” of the rebellion: “But now inspir’d with patriot love / I come th’ oppression to remove; / To free you from the heavy clogg / Of every tyrant-​­demagogue.” 6 Having established Burgoyne as capable of deceiving even himself of his true motives, Livingston abruptly shifts the tone from comic to deadly serious, as the promise of magnanimity gives way to boasts about the strength of his army and his willingness to use every available means to destroy those who would defy him. Retaining only the manic pace of the earlier part of the poem, Livingston turns to address the darker image of Burgoyne then circulating, as the cold-​­blooded general who is all too willing, as Burgoyne puts it in the original, to “give stretch to the Indian forces under [his] direction” (see Figure 4):

War and Literary War   61 With the most christian spirit fir’d And by true soldiership inspir’d, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ​ I will let loose the dogs of Hell, Ten thousand Indians, who shall yell, And foam and tear, and grin and roar, And drench their maukesins in gore; To these I’ll give full scope and play From Ticonderoge to Florida; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . If after all these lovely warnings, My wishes and my bowels yearnings, You shall remain as deaf as adder, Or grow with hostile rage the madder, I swear by George and by St. Paul I will exterminate you all. By the end of the poem, Burgoyne is more than ridiculous: he is a profoundly hateful character who delights in his capacity to terrorize readers by exploiting their fears of Indian “savagery,” and who identifies personally with such brutality, as indicated by his final, cold-​­blooded threat to exterminate an entire population should it attempt to oppose him. If, as one historian puts it, the original proclamation was sufficiently ill-​­conceived in tone and message as to breed “a passion to stop him,” Livingston’s versification reinforced that passion, such that the two documents, which were frequently reprinted in succession, would combine to shape the popular narrative of the campaign that would take hold after Burgoyne’s defeat.7 At the same time, the fullness of this narrative becomes even more recognizable when the works are read not as a simple satiric tit for tat but as part of a larger chronological unfolding of interrelated texts, beginning in the weeks preceding the battle and concluding with the dispatches from the battle lines as they were being reported. The first important intersection of poetry and news involved Livingston’s initial publication of the parody in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet at the end of August 1777. Following the appearance of Burgoyne’s original proclamation a week earlier in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and at the same moment numerous writers were commenting on Burgoyne’s arrogance and penchant for savagery, Livingston—​­identifying himself only as “A New-​­Jersey Man”—​­submitted

Figure 4. Cover page of Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 26, 1777. New Jersey governor William Livingston recognized the rhetorical power of issuing proclamations and subverting, through versification, proclamations issued by rival British leaders. At the top of the page is Livingston’s parody of Burgoyne’s proclamation to the people of New York; at the bottom is Livingston’s own proclamation prohibiting the granting of passports from Patriot-controlled New Jersey to British-occupied New York. American Antiquarian Society.

War and Literary War   63 the parody with a request that the editor print “the following Version of the most bombastic production that British insolence has hitherto exhibited.” Remarkably, another text appears farther down the same page—​­also by Livingston, and also a proclamation—​­“By his Excellency WILLIAM LIVINGSTON, Esquire, Governor, Captain General and Commander in Chief in and over the State of New-​­Jersey . . . ,”8 which prohibited the granting of passports from Patriot-​­controlled New Jersey to British-​­occupied New York, expressly to prevent espionage. In the context of the ongoing struggle among competing authoritative documents, this juxtaposition is significant. It suggests, first and foremost, that Livingston found nothing contradictory about employing a proclamation to control the movement of people in his own jurisdiction while on the other hand undermining similar commands by a rival authority. Indeed, it is reasonable to conclude that he conceived the two forms as serving complementary functions, with his literary endeavor aiding and extending his political goals as New Jersey’s commander in chief. Through the publication of these companion documents, he established a pattern of conflating war and literary war that would be replicated throughout the Revolution. At the same time, the notion that Livingston’s versification could be understood as an agent in the war effort becomes clearer when both works are read in the context of their republication in one newspaper in particular, the New-­York Journal, and the General Advertiser, which, largely by accident, found itself in the position of being the first to report the news of the battle and of Burgoyne’s surrender. Though the paper’s editor, John Holt, had spent more than a decade publishing his avowedly Whig paper in New York City, in the wake of the British occupation he fled northward, eventually reviving the Journal in the summer of 1777 in the village of Kingston, New York—​­nearer to Saratoga than any other Patriot newspaper, and thus fortuitously situated to report on the status of Burgoyne’s advance. Before long, Holt’s dispatches, bearing the dateline “Kingston,” were providing the earliest word on the unfolding action. Such dispatches, in turn, both informed and were informed by the Journal’s concurrent reprinting of Burgoyne’s proclamation and Livingston’s versification.9 Holt reprinted Burgoyne’s original proclamation on September 1, in the same issue that reported news of the first major setbacks in Burgoyne’s plans, the defeat of Lt. Col. Barry St. Leger at Fort Stanwix and the loss of more than nine hundred men at the Battle of Bennington. Holt reported that there was reason to believe that “the enemy lost a greater number of men than the public

64   Chapter 2 have yet been informed,” such that the local people have begun to “recover their spirits, and many are moving back into their former habitations.” The juxtaposition between the two pieces provided the first hint of tension between Burgoyne’s overconfident pronouncements and the reality on the ground. One week later, the paper led with Livingston’s versification on page 1, which, when read in the light of the previous issue’s increasing optimism that Burgoyne’s advance might be impeded by attrition, served at once to diminish anxiety over Burgoyne’s military advantage and to reinforce, through the characterization of Burgoyne, the moral imperative of defeating him. In the issues that followed, Holt updated his dispatches, reporting that Burgoyne was hemmed in near Stillwater and short of supplies, and then finally, in the issue of October 13, he printed a “letter from the Northward,” which predicted what had once seemed impossible: “In a few days, I think Burgoyne will be entirely surrounded.” Four days later, Burgoyne’s soldiers surrendered.10 In this interplay between verse and prose, literature and news, all in the fluid context of an ongoing military campaign, one glimpses the degree to which a poem could seem to transcend the “merely” literary to emerge as an agent in the historical process. Within the narrative logic of the print public sphere—​­in which events reported as news appeared alongside other texts in a system of mediation that unfolded temporally—​­such a timely publication as Livingston’s could appear as one of a series of events leading inexorably ­toward the specific outcome of Burgoyne’s defeat. In the aftermath of the surrender, the act of unmasking Burgoyne’s claim to military dominance could be read as narrative foreshadowing in a story of cosmic retribution against British arrogance. As a poem that lent moral and ideological weight to this narrative, moreover, Livingston’s versification also helped to transform the surrender itself into something much larger in its implications—​­an event not simply about Burgoyne, or even imperial Britain as a whole, but about human pride and the capacity for evil. This is how the story would be remembered in the poems and ballads published after the fact, as evidenced in such works as Grateful Reflections On the Divine Goodness vouchsaf ’d to the American Arms in their remarkable successes in the Northern Department, after the giving up of our Fortresses at Ticonderoga. By the end of the war, Burgoyne’s name would be turned into a verb meaning “to be defeated at the moment of apparent triumph,” as in the title of a 1781 ballad on the Battle of Yorktown, “Cornwallis Burgoyned.”11 Such narrative logic as this, in which poetry appeared not simply as a mode

War and Literary War   65 of commentary but as an agent in the historical process itself, would in turn account for another common motif in Revolutionary verse: namely, the tendency of poets to indulge in fantasies about the potential effects of the publication of their poems. As we shall find in Chapter 3, this will most often involve poems purporting to expose some sinister conspiracy against the public good, whether in the guise of a rebel or Tory cabal or, in the aftermath of independence, a faction seeking to advance an agenda that contradicts the will of the people. In the meantime, the same faith in the power of poetry to intervene in the struggle between competing texts—​­proclamations issued by royal governors, on the one hand, and counterproclamations by state assemblies or by Congress, on the other—​­would continue unabated, ultimately extending beyond the specific fashion for penning versifications. For if the form’s negation of authoritative language opened space for rival claims to authority by ascendant colonial officials (with the most famous example being the Declaration of Independence), Loyalist poets seeking to invalidate such claims would need a counterstrategy of their own. That strategy, importantly, would involve reviving a different subgenre of eighteenth-​­century verse, one that communicated a negation of the rebel’s claims as well as a symbolic reaffirmation of the old order.

Satirizing the “Word” of Congress As a literary form that enacted symbolic resistance by an anonymous public against the professed power of a governor or military commander, the versification proved wholly suitable for conveying the rebel or insurgent position, both before and during the war. Yet if one purpose of the versification form was to help open the way for popular declarations issued by town meetings and state assemblies, it seemed likely that British or Loyalist poets would recognize a similar capacity in the versification’s ability to invalidate the claims of such directives. And indeed, a few British and Loyalist versifiers joined the fray, including the anonymous poet who, in 1774, first defined the penchant for verse parody as a literary “vogue.” At the moment Gage was waging his first discursive war against the Massachusetts “Solemn League and Covenant,” similar leagues, assemblies, and committees of correspondence were forming in neighboring colonies, and in the late summer of 1774, these disparate bodies appointed delegates to what they styled a “Grand Continental Congress.” Among the

66   Chapter 2 Congress’s first official acts was drafting the Articles of Association, which announced a collective protest against the Coercive Acts and a general boycott on importation and consumption of British goods. As if in mirror image of the anti-​­Gage parodies, the articles were parodied and set to music by the pseudonymous wit “Bob Jingle” in a twenty-​­two-​­page pamphlet The Association, &c. of the Delegates of the Colonies, at the Grand Congress, Held at Philadelphia, Sept. 1, 1774, Versified, and adapted to Music. As Philip Gould points out in his recent analysis of The Association, whatever political and ideological intentions Bob Jingle had for the work, his introduction focuses chiefly on matters of taste and aesthetics; the recent fashion for versification, he explains, is an outgrowth of the “reigning taste” for transforming the “plain prose” of political texts into verse. Yet if the mention of the proliferation of verse parodies implied a parallel between this work and the many anti-​­Gage versifications that had recently appeared, The Association was a very different kind of parody. Part of the difference arose from the disparity between the claims to power being made in the respective parodied documents: whereas Gage’s proclamations derived their authority from the king and demanded implicit submission from their readers/subjects, the Articles of Association was a work of persuasion, an attempt to rally the people into resisting Parliament. In this sense, the text of the Articles themselves served to block at least one fundamental strategy of the versification as a form, to symbolize resistance against an assertion of authority.12 To be sure, the Articles rested on several radical and potentially problematic assumptions that made them vulnerable to satire. They assumed, first and foremost, that the “Grand Congress” was a perfect representation the people (which the very existence of Loyalists contradicted), and they also assumed those very people possessed rights that contradicted the will of the king and Parliament. At the same time, these assumptions lay buried beneath the more emphatic language of petition, as well as an early and frequent insistence that the delegates remained “his Majesty’s most loyal subjects.” Perhaps as a result, the satiric thrust of The Association bypasses the issue of the Congress’s legitimacy; instead it focuses on exposing the “true” character and motives of the delegates themselves, representing them as a drunken and unruly demos that stubbornly resists all taxes, however justifiable, and outrageously defends its “Right” to “rob and plunder others” by trafficking in smuggled goods. By taking the additional step of setting his versification to music and organizing it as a kind of dramatic set piece (complete with an opening song, a recitative, and

War and Literary War   67 a chorus), the author thus produced a work that was less a parody of a congressional document than a comic opera aimed at ridiculing the Americans as incapable of governing themselves responsibly: And if you still despise our Speeches, Eftsoons we’ll make you sh-​­t your Breeches. The Parliament shall straight repeal, All Tax-​­Acts on our Common-​­Weal; All Acts imposing Dues or Custom, For which we’ve bully’d, cheated, curst ’em; The Act on Tea, by which our Ribs, And Daughters have told many Fibs; The Tax on Wine, which warms and mellows, And makes us now such Bravo-​­Fellows; That, on Molasses we bring home, For this affects our favorite Rum. The satiric emphasis here, as Gould shows, is on debasing the cultural position of the rebels rather than attacking the radical act of invoking an organized association of colonies with a common strategy of resistance. One reason for this may be that the Congress of 1774 did not appear a significant threat to British authority; indeed, by the time The Association appeared in print, the Congress had already dissolved. This was not the case, however, in the following year, after the outbreak of war necessitated the calling of a second Congress, which by the summer of 1775 was operating as a full-​­fledged countergovernment and competing with royal governors and military commanders for the people’s assent. This is the point that the strategy of anti-​ ­Congress versifications would turn to the perceived illogic of the Congress’s claim to legitimacy.13 This shift is evident in a variation on the versification form published in the London Public Advertiser under the heading “The following Abstract of the Resolves of the General Congress, assembled at Philadelphia in 1775, is put into Metre, for the help of weak Memories.” Significant, first, as a reminder that the fashion for versifications was a transatlantic phenomenon, this poem departs from Bob Jingle’s emphasis on the character of the rebels as well as the Patriot versifiers’ emphasis on parodying a specific document. As the title suggests, the poem is more a general abstract of Congress’s resolves

68   Chapter 2 than a parody of a specific document; yet it nevertheless works in a similar way, listing a series of caricatured resolutions that are meant to undermine the validity of Congress’s specific critiques, and more fundamentally, the justification of its existence as a governing body: “The Congress Resolves to acknowledge the King, / But not to obey him in any one Thing: / RESOLVES—​­That the Parliament’s guilty of Treason, / For trying to bring the Bostonians to Reason.” The larger point is that in the course of issuing its resolutions, the Congress has tied itself in knots declaring that its members are, and are not, subject to the king’s authority. Variations on the theme of logical confusion permeate the poem, as in the following passage that cleverly plays out the circularity implicit in the claims issued by this so-​­called representative body: “RESOLV’D, in the People that Power does dwell, / Who have vested in us their Right to rebel: / ’Tis therefore determin’d by Sov’reign Command, / That these our RESOLVES are the Laws of the Land.”14 The authority of the Congress, in other words, rests on its power to rebel, which is to say, on its power to refuse to assent to precisely the sort of resolutions as its members themselves were issuing. This argument would seem all the more prescient the following year, when the same Congress issued the Declaration of Independence. Unlike the earlier popular declarations by committees of correspondence, state assemblies, and the First Congress, which had been reticent about laying claim to a level of political authority that rivaled that of the king or Parliament, the Declaration was audacious: not only did it lay claim to precisely such power, it went further, effectively speaking the United States of America into existence. Such an act of linguistic alchemy, as British and Loyalist critics would increasingly charge, called for a comparable satiric response, which would come in the form of a verse satire entitled “The Word of Congress” by one of the most prolific Loyalist poets of the period, Jonathan Odell. Though not published until 1779, when Odell was living safely in the garrison town of New York and contributing regularly to Rivington’s Royal Gazette, “The Word of Congress” constituted the Loyalist response to the Declaration of Independence as well as to the numerous official directives issued subsequently by the Second Congress, including its blueprint for the new government, the 1778 Articles of Confederation. Like his Patriot counterparts, Odell takes as his primary target the relationship between power and the printed word. Yet rather than responding in the form of parody, Odell reaches back to the tradition of high-​­Augustan satire that included Alexander Pope, Edward Young, Charles Churchill, and

War and Literary War   69 their American imitators during the Stamp Act crisis. Such poetry is characterized, as we saw in Chapter 1, by expressions of righteous indignation against a world turned upside down, and from Odell’s perspective, the primary feature of this upside-​­down world is that an upstart assemblage of rebels has produced a series of documents that, far from being ridiculed or ignored, have somehow achieved actual, concrete form in the committees, special courts, and militias, all of which seem to have been called into existence as if out of thin air. Odell had experienced the real-​­life effects of the new American government directly and poignantly between 1776 and 1778, when, under surveillance by the local Committee of Public Safety, he fled his home in Burlington, New Jersey, to spend the remainder of the war as a chaplain in British-​­occupied Philadelphia, and later in New York. Against this backdrop, “The Word of Congress” addresses not only the effrontery of the Congress’s issuing of declarations but also the more inexplicable process by which a declaration issued by an illegitimate body could somehow transform men into officers of a newly formed shadow government with the power to determine the fate of a loyal subject of the Crown. This process—​­by which mere language is capable of speaking material reality into existence—​­is the controlling metaphor of the poem, which is presented in the opening lines as a perverse example of the biblical formula “the Word made flesh.” Alluding both to this phrase from the beginning of the book of John and the equally famous verse from Matthew, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” Odell characterizes the Word of Congress as a similarly immaterial reality that has paradoxically become not only substance but also food: “The Word of Congress, like a round of beef, / To hungry Satire gives a sure relief: / No trifling tid-​­bits to delude the pen; / But solid victuals cut and come again.”15 Yet beyond suggesting a quasi-​­metaphysical status afforded to the Word of Congress—​­which remains capitalized, in biblical fashion, for the remainder of the poem—​­the metaphor also reveals Odell’s desired effect for his poem. If the Word of Congress is “like a round of beef,” Odell’s satiric response amounts to an act of discursive devouring, giving “sure relief ” to the indignant satirist, and more important, nullifying Congress’s power to remake the world through linguistic alchemy. By representing his satire as the discursive antagonist of such texts as the Declaration of Independence, Odell addresses one of the key differences between a royal proclamation and a congressional declaration. Whereas the

70   Chapter 2 former issued from a single identifiable speaker—​­which, as we have seen, opened it up to caricature of a personal sort—​­the latter was by definition anonymous and collective, the vox populi transposed into print. Against this, Odell’s invocation to Satire personified in the opening lines—​­recalling earlier invocations by Young, Churchill, and Benjamin Church, pits the anonymous voice of Congress against another, more traditional, anonymous voice of Satire. This is Satire as the voice of a traditional moral order delivering its verdict on a corrupt society and reasserting in its place a stable, unchanging truth. Indeed, as Odell goes on to imply, such a verdict is precisely the opposite of the shifting, “many colour’d” Word of Congress: Oh! ’tis a Word of pow’r, of prime account, I’ve seen it like the daring Osprey mount; I’ve seen it like a dirty reptile creep, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I’ve seen it softer than the vernal rain, Mildly descending on the grassy plain—​­ I’ve heard it pious as a saint in pray’r—​­ I’ve heard it like an angry trooper swear – I’ve known it suit itself to ev’ry plan – I’ve known it lie to God, and lie to Man.16 In describing the Word of Congress as variably gentle or violent, issuing from the mouth of a pious saint or an angry soldier, Odell is speaking once again from personal experience, as someone who found it impossible to reconcile the lofty ideals of the Patriot movement with his own harsh treatment at the hands of provincial authorities. Insofar as the Word is intangible and abstract, he warned, it can be molded into various shapes, suited to “ev’ry plan,” which is why the poet declares at the end of this passage that the Word of Congress is, at bottom, a lie to God as well as man. Yet as he also illustrates throughout, this very intangibility is the paradoxical source of its power, for like a spirit descending from on high, the Word of Congress is capable of effecting countless personal transformations. Thus, for instance, the renowned scientist and inventor David Rittenhouse perceives the Word “sound[ing] in his ears,” listens to its voice “with strange delight,” and sinks from the lofty realms of science to become a “paltry statesman” and “Vice President elect of rogues and fools.” Similar transformations are recounted over the course of

War and Literary War   71 the poem, with Odell directing his satire at public officials from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, who, by the power of Congress’s words, have become state Supreme Court justices or members of their committees of safety. This, too, is central to Odell’s strategy: countering the assertion that the new federal and state governments actually represent the voice of the people, Odell goes to considerable lengths to personalize the Patriot movement as an assortment of individuals who can be tangibly described and derided for their specific vices and follies.17 Thus, after presenting over the course of hundreds of lines a rogue’s gallery of prominent Whigs, Odell takes up the question central to the poem’s preoccupation with the transforming power of the “Word.” How did this fledgling colonial resistance, within only a few years, develop not only into a war for independence but also a radical overthrow of the very state apparatuses that had until recently so successfully enacted their authority? For Odell, the answer is found in the evolving rhetoric of the Congress and of the newspapers that reported on its actions. In the beginning, such rhetoric was wholly unlike what it would eventually become: Congress spoke of resisting only the most intolerable acts of Parliament, respectfully petitioned the king for redress, and insisted on the loyalty of its members. But over time, the Word of Congress took on a life of its own, leading the people unwittingly down a serpentine path to what can only be defined as treason: Whoe’er the word of Congress shall peruse, In every piece will see it change its views—​­ Now, swell with duty to the King elate, Now, melt with kindness to the parent state; Then back to treason suddenly revolve. The lines that follow this passage trace a process, importantly, that involves not simply Congress’s textual productions but also those of the Patriot press: “Trace it through all the windings of the press, / Vote or appeal, petition or address, / Trace it in every act; in every speech, / Too sure you’ll find duplicity in each.”18 In this way, the poem treats the dissemination of treasonous ideas via print more broadly as constituting a crucial second stage of political transformation. The acts of the First Congress, Odell recalls, were unable to gain a large enough following to realize their underlying logic of political independence;

72   Chapter 2 yet “Not so discourag’d, the prolific Word / To more successful artifice recurr’d. / Swarms of deceivers, practis’d in the trade, / Were sent abroad to gull, cajole, persuade.” Odell has in mind here Patriot printers such as John Holt and Benjamin Edes, but the chief villain in his collection of “hireling authors” is Thomas Paine, who figures in the poem not as an original thinker in his own right but as an instrument of Benjamin Franklin, who “caught at Payne; reliev’d his wretched plight, / And gave him notes, and sat him down to write.” The rest is history: Common Sense “like wildfire through the country ran, / And Folly bow’d the knee to [Franklin]’s plan. / Sense, reason, judgment were abash’d and fled; / And Congress reign’d triumphant in their stead.” Thus does “The Word of Congress” announce itself not simply as Odell’s satiric response to Congress’s acts of linguistic deception but also as addressing the larger connection between the outbreak of the rebellion and the power of print to alter public opinion, individual by individual, ultimately effecting political transformation on a massive scale.19 In the poem’s conclusion, Odell renews his call for the muse of satire to put an end to this process by delivering a final, devastating blow to Congress and to the writers and editors who have lent legitimacy to its acts and utterances. Expressing the hope that some greater Genius will rise up to stop “the monster Congress” from raging, he vows to fight on as long as his abilities allow: “And when the feather’d weapon I prepare / Once more to lay the villain’s bosom bare; / Let inspiration from th’ethereal height / Shed on my soul her vivifying light.” As these lines suggest, Odell calls upon divine and literary inspiration to combat the modern, print-​­centered inspiration taking hold throughout the new United States. Recalling the image from the opening lines, of Satire’s devouring the Word of Congress, Odell permits himself a final fantasy that his “feather’d weapon” will be enough to symbolically destroy the language of his opponents: “Ask I too much—​­then grant me for a time / Some deleterious pow’rs of acrid rhyme: / Some ars’nic verse, to poison with the pen, / These rats, who nestle in the Lion’s den.”20 The great irony surrounding Odell’s dream of satiric annihilation of the Word of Congress was that his own poem, no less than Common Sense or any other Patriot text, was part of precisely the same media environment that Odell decries in “The Word of Congress.” He imagines that a satiric voice—​ ­his own or that of some greater genius—​­will suddenly and universally awaken those souls who have erstwhile been converted by the Word of Congress and return them to their former sense and reason. Yet this dream was in direct

War and Literary War   73 contradiction to the very logic of discursive warfare within which Odell himself was participating: “The Word of Congress,” which appeared in print in September of 1779, was already part of an established string of literary and nonliterary textual exchanges, within which no single utterance was “consumed” or erased, only countered by another. A literary response like that which Odell has in mind might succeed in altering the meaning of the original, but only so long as it, too, remains unanswered by another opponent. His concluding fantasy of the symbolic silencing of folly by satire had already been rendered anachronistic, for in giving voice to this fantasy, he was sending his words into a print public sphere whose workings all but ensured that the debate would not end with his solemn pronouncements.

The War in Song and Verse Even as versifiers and satirists continued to engage in the ongoing struggle over political legitimacy, after 1775, they did so against the backdrop of a war that had the potential to render such linguistic struggles largely irrelevant. Whether a vice-​­regent could compel the actions of the king’s subjects or Congress had the authority to issue directives in the name of the United States, the fate of both depended on success or failure on the battlefield. Befitting this importance, the military conflict inspired numerous songs and poems: odes commemorating battles and campaigns, elegies to fallen heroes, ballads composed and sung for and by the soldiers who were fighting. Poets and balladeers sought to direct the discursive narrative of the war by reframing battles as cosmic dramas or comic farces and by defining the opposition according to familiar tropes and archetypes. For the literary supporters of the Patriot cause, the Revolution was a story of common citizens defending their liberty against an admittedly more powerful enemy; for British and Loyalist writers, it was about defending English liberty against an unlawful insurgency made up of bumpkins and rabble-​­rousers. While these competing narratives sometimes reverberated past one another in songs praising the valor of a soldier or regiment, they often followed a pattern similar to that of pre-​­Revolutionary satiric exchanges, where ballads engaged directly or indirectly with opposing texts—​ ­most often, other ballads—​­in an ongoing attempt to wrest control of the meaning of the war in a dynamic that paralleled the back-​­and-​­forth engagement of a military struggle. After the colonial volunteers’ surprising successes in the first battles of

74   Chapter 2 1775 and 1776, the crucial question was whether the insurgents could survive a lengthy campaign. Even after Congress took the step of commissioning George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army, it remained to be seen how they could contend against the experience and discipline of the British regulars. For British and Loyalist poets, the rebel prospects were comically unpromising. The members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had acknowledged in their address to Washington that the volunteers were deficient in training, dress, and even cleanliness—​­and this sentiment was promptly versified by an anonymous poet in the London Public Advertiser: “We can’t indeed pretend to prattle / About their mighty Skill in Battle; / Nor can we say much in their Favour, / About the Sweetness of their Savour; / Being destitute of Cleanliness / Alike in Lodging and in Dress.”21 Perhaps owing to this sense of inferiority, Patriot authors soon began a campaign of composing war ballads in the hope of boosting morale, and they did so, importantly, by tapping into one of the crucial ideological advantages that the British troops enjoyed: a long tradition of military ballads extolling their valor and celebrating their past victories. From at least the time of the English Civil War, songs like “The British Grenadiers” and “The 10th Regiment Song” had played a vital role in British campaigns, often sung by soldiers on the march and accompanied by fife and drum corps. By the middle of the eighteenth century, regiments came to be identified by their signature tunes, and versions of war ballads became popular folk standards in their own right, appearing regularly in newspapers and as broadsides. This tradition served as the foundation for American war songs that sought to counter the cultural and ideological force of British ballads by imitating, parodying, and transforming their words and music. The most immediate ballad strategy was simple imitation, as seen in the 1775 broadside “Americans to Arms,” which essentially takes the ballad “Britons to Arms” and substitutes “Americans” for “Britons,” as if to drown out doubts over the colonial forces’ readiness with a series of overconfident boasts. Other Patriot ballads, such Jonathan Sewall’s “A New Song, to the tune of the British grenadier,” addressed the perceived imbalance between the opposing forces in both their form and their content. Borrowing its tune from one of the most popular English war ballads, Sewall’s “New Song” inverts the bravado of the original into a counterboast declaring that Washington’s appointment as commander signals the end of the era of British military dominance that songs like “The British Grenadiers” exemplified: “VAIN BRITONS, boast no longer

War and Literary War   75 with proud Indignity, / By Land your conquering Legions, your matchless Strength at Sea; / Since We your braver SONS, insens’d, our Swords have girded on, / Huzza, Huzza, Huzza, Huzza, for WARD and WASHINGTON!”22 Aspiring to an even higher level of satiric sophistication was “The King’s Own Regulars,” commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin, which appeared at a crucial moment in the spring of 1776 when the Congress was contemplating the question of declaring independence. Taking the ironic form of a ballad in praise of the Regulars and sung in the parodied voice of a soldier from that regiment, the song recounts the many occasions, from the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 to the Seven Years’ War, when the vaunted British regulars were forced to retreat: At Prestonpans we met with some Rebels one day, We marshall’d ourselves all in comely array; Our hearts were all stout, and bid our legs stay, But our feet were wrong-​­headed, and took us away. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To Ticonderoga we went in a passion, Swearing to be revenged on the whole French nation; But we soon turn’d tail, without hesitation, Because they fought behind trees—​­which is not the regular fashion. In the context of the unease colonials felt about their chances in a long war against a superior army, such a passage is significant not merely for its satiric reversal—​­in this case, giving the lie to the Regulars’ slogan that they “ne’er run away”—​­but because it advances the potentially powerful counternarrative that it was possible to destabilize the celebrated discipline of the King’s Own Regulars with guerrilla tactics, such as fighting “behind trees.” This latter point is emphasized repeatedly in the song, in particular in the final stanzas recounting the success of the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. In the context of the ongoing war, this served as a rationale for imagining future Patriot victories: “Of their firing from behind fences he makes a great pother, / Every fence has two sides; they made use of one, and we only forgot to use the other; / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ As they could not get before us, how could they look us in the face? / We took care they shouldn’t, by scampering away apace.”23 The same strategy of deflecting or playing on the respective forces’ reputations extended to a curious subgenre of ballads that parodied the conventional

76   Chapter 2 ballads that solemnly narrated various decisive battles and memorialized fallen heroes.24 This is a form that is best described as a commemoration of a comic pseudo-​­battle in which soldiers are described as “contending” against unexpected but wholly unthreatening circumstances, which end up exposing them as fools or cowards. The most famous Patriot example of this type of ballad is Francis Hopkinson’s “Battle of the Kegs,” which tells the true story of an unsuccessful attempt by the fledgling American Navy to inflict damage on British ships in Philadelphia by floating kegs of gunpowder down the Delaware River. Among of the best remembered of all Revolutionary War satires, “The Battle of the Kegs” exemplifies the relationship between actual and literary warfare in that it arose out of Hopkinson’s primary function in the war as chairman of the Continental Navy Board. Among his duties was to oversee an experimental operation to use David Bushnell’s recent invention of floating mines to attack the British fleet. In December 1776, a letter, likely written by Hopkinson, was sent from the navy board to George Washington, informing him that the development of the new weapon was proceeding “with Secrecy and Dispatch” and that they expected to “try the important Experiment” within days. To Hopkinson’s disappointment, the floating mines did little damage to the British fleet, but they did cause the British soldiers to panic and open fire on the kegs, apparently believing them to be manned by rebels. When Hopkinson was informed of this reaction, he immediately turned the episode into an opportunity for disseminating anti-​­British propaganda: according to his biographer, Hopkinson was most likely the author of an account of the event in the New Jersey Gazette that shifted the focus of the story from the failure of the experiment to its success at frightening and humiliating the troops. Not to let the story die there, Hopkinson then composed the ballad and published it in the Pennsylvania Packet some weeks later.25 Whether the episode actually led to the citywide commotion described in the song, it allowed for a portrayal of the British soldiers and sailors—​­from General Howe and Sir William Erskine down to the common rank and file—​ ­as superstitious, gullible, and anxious. Beginning with an ironic allusion to the literary tradition of commemorating famous battles—​­“ ’Twas early day, as poets say, / Just as the Sun was rising”—​­the song recounts the initial responses of a British soldier and sailor seeing the floating kegs and immediately concluding that “some mischief ’s brewing.” This expectation exemplifies a broader representation of the British forces as perpetually nervous about what the rebels might be up to. Fearing that “These kegs now hold the rebels bold, / . . . ​

War and Literary War   77 / And they’re come down t’attack the town,” the soldiers spread the word until it reaches Quartermaster General William Erskine, who despite his superior rank, exhibits the same irrational fears: Arise! arise! Sir Erskine cries: The rebels—​­more’s the pity— Without a boat, are all afloat, And rang’d before the city. The motley crew, in vessels new, With Satan for their guide, sir, Pack’d up in bags, and wooden KEGS, Come driving down the tide, sir. “Therefore prepare for bloody war; These KEGS must all be routed, Or sorely we despis’d shall be; And British courage doubted.”26 This theme of British anxiety over the possibility that their valor may be doubted runs throughout the song, concluding in an expression of mock admiration for their courage. Despite the fact that their superior firepower succeeding only in destroying a few barrels, the speaker praises their ability to “conquer” the “rebel” attack: “The KEGS, ’tis said, tho’ strongly made / Of rebel staves and hoops, sir, / Could not oppose their pow’rful foes, / The conqu’ring British troops, sir.” Besides lampooning the soldiers’ overreaction, these lines highlight the fact that the rebels themselves scarcely appear in the song at all, and to the extent that they do, they figure chiefly as a measure of Britain’s dwindling military prowess. The same point is reinforced in the song’s final lines, as the speaker ironically suggests that future poets will scarcely be able to do justice to such a battle: “An hundred men, with each a pen, / Or more, upon my word, sir, / It is most true, would be too few, / Their valour to record, sir. / Such feats did they perform that day / Against the wicked KEGS, Sir, / That years to come, if they get home, / They’ll make their boasts and brags, sir.”27 The allusion here to Prince Harry’s rousing “We Happy Few” speech from Henry V, juxtaposed with the overall bathos of the song’s form and subject matter, reveals British imperial power as a parody of its former glory.

78   Chapter 2 The closest British or Loyalist counterpart to “The Battle of the Kegs” is John André’s 1780 ballad “The Cow-​­Chace,” which performs a similar act of turning a botched attack against a Loyalist-​­held blockhouse in New Jersey into an occasion for satirizing the rebel soldiers as low-​­born, drunken, and cowardly. The skirmish, which proved costly to General Anthony Wayne’s Pennsylvania brigades, was widely reported in the newspapers, several of which noted that though the troops failed in their primary mission, they at least managed to drive away “several hundred head . . . ​of horses, horned cattle, sheep and hogs, which the banditti that infest that neighborhood had plundered from the inhabitants.” André, who was serving nearby in New York, seized on the latter incident and transformed it into a three-​­canto farce, culminating in a comic, frenzied retreat of men and cows and sheep. Though not a direct retort to Hopkinson’s ballad, it implicitly responds to “The Battle of the Kegs” by similarly announcing itself as a burlesque of the serious ballad form—​­in this case, through its sustained allusion to the fifteenth-​­century English classic “Chevy-​­Chace,” which told the story of a hunting party that unexpectedly found itself in a bloody battle. In André’s version, the sequence is reversed, as a would-​­be battle degenerates into a cattle raid, which, the speaker insists, will live on in the memory of the various livestock involved: To drive the kine one summer’s morn, The TANNER took his way; The Calf shall rue that is unborn, The jumbling of that day. And Wayne descending Steers shall know, And tauntingly deride; And call to mind in ev’ry low, The tanning of his hide.28 The song has been described as shifting uneasily between coarse vulgarity on the one hand and ironic elevation on the other. The overarching use of the serious ballad form and regular allusions to classical mythology and Roman history tend ­toward the high-​­burlesque tradition of the mock heroic. At the same, André exhibits a fascination with the diction and imagery of low burlesque, as in the speaker’s appellation above for General Wayne—​ ­“The TANNER,” in reference to his father’s bovine-​­related occupation—​­and

War and Literary War   79 his description of Wayne as “driv[ing] the kine”—​­a phrase that renders the feat all the meaner through its use of the Anglo-​­Saxon archaism. Such generic instability runs through the work as a whole: in one canto Wayne’s soldiers are portrayed as vicious brutes whose courage grows with every cup of rum they swill, and who are roused by Wayne’s vow to “deal a horrid slaughter” on the Loyalist civilians and even to “ravish wife and daughter.” In another, the song abruptly shifts to using ornate Latinate diction and classical allusion, such as when Wayne is charmed by a local “HAMADRYAD,” or wood nymph, who implores “the great commander” to hear her “lamentations” over the Loyalists’ felling of a nearby grove.29 This generic instability may be understood as a function of the dual and, at times, conflicting ideological purposes of the ballad. For while the mock-​ ­heroic elements of “The Cow-​­Chase” were an effective means for accomplishing one purpose—​­to deflate the outsized military aspirations of the colonial forces—​­they did little to counter the strategy we have seen in Patriot war ballads, to focus relentlessly on the failures of the British forces while sidestepping any explicit representation of their own forces. “The Cow-​­Chase” responds to this strategy by supplying an ample measure of concrete, personal representations of the American soldiers and calling on the diction and imagery of low burlesque to accomplish this purpose. Thus the emphasis on Wayne’s drunken soldiers becoming so overcome with fervor for battle that they end up soiling themselves, and thus the ballad’s chaotic finale, which symbolically erases the distinction between the “drums and colours” of the cavalry and the cows and sheep running alongside them. Concluding with an allusion to the final lines of Swift’s “Description of a City Shower,” André reinforces this conflation of human and animal by comparing the scene to a confluence of “kennels,” or street gutters, overflowing with waste: As when two kennels in the street, Swell’d with a recent rain, In gushing streams together meet, And seek the neighboring drain; So met these dung-​­born tribes in one, As swift in their career, And so to Newbridge they ran on,‑‑ But all the cows got clear.30

80   Chapter 2 Such moments serve as a reminder that underlying the ballad wars over American military readiness lay the more fundamental struggle over American identity—​­more specifically, how, or whether, American identity could be positively defined. Nowhere was this struggle more apparent or more complex than in the exchange between Patriot and British versions of the “Yankee Doodle” motif. For not only was “Yankee Doodle” the most famous ballad archetype of the Revolution, it was also the most contested, appearing in both Patriot and British/Loyalist guises from the outbreak of the war until nearly its end. Indeed, the contested nature of the song’s meaning is evident in the complicated and often misreported history of its origins: as J. A. Leo Lemay conclusively demonstrated decades ago, “Yankee Doodle” was not (as had long been claimed) penned by a British army doctor as a satire of colonial militiamen during the Seven Years’ War. Rather, it originated as an American folk ballad, with elements going back at least to the Battle of Cape Breton in 1745, and more likely to the “musters” and Election Day rituals of early New England. At the same time, much of the confusion over the song’s intent is understandable because, during the British occupation of the colonies in the years preceding the war, British soldiers performed the song as a means of caricaturing the colonials as backwoods yokels, unfit for military service. This simple satiric version of the motif is found in a string of British or Loyalist “Yankee Doodle” songs that appeared throughout the war, beginning with “Adam’s Fall: The Trip to Cambridge,” which takes as its subject Washington’s arrival in Massachusetts as commander in chief. The song opens by ridiculing the rising general as an ambitious upstart whose claim to leadership is owed chiefly to his wardrobe, as in several descriptions in which he is “clothed in power and breeches,” “prinked up in full-​­bag wig” and “in leathers tight.” More scathing still, the song presents the troops commanded by Washington as an assortment of marginal colonial figures: “The rebel clowns, oh! what a sight! / Too awkward was their figure. / ’Twas yonder stood a pious wight, / And here and there a nigger.” Versions of this low-​­born (and, in this case, racially inferior) caricature of Americans would serve as the basis of most later British variations of the song, which usually added stock elements like cowardice and drunkenness, such as in “Yankee Doodle’s Expedition to Rhode Island,” which commemorated the failed attempt by combined American and French forces to capture Newport in the summer of 1778. In an echo of “The Cow-​­Chace,” the figure of Yankee Doodle is presented as innately cowardly but capable of being temporarily made brave by drink, and thus easily rattled

War and Literary War   81 by the superior British forces: “So Yankee Doodle did forget / The sound of British drum, Sir, / How oft it made him quake and sweat / In spite of Yankee Rum, Sir.” 31 The social satire embedded in British and Loyalist versions of “Yankee Doodle” was so wholly identified with the song’s meaning that even prior to the war, the tune alone signified an implicit taunt against “yokel” Americans. In March 1775, the Pennsylvania Journal reported the tarring and feathering of a perceived rebel by British troops in Philadelphia; fixing a sign on his back reading “American Liberty or a Specimen of Democracy,” the troops “played ‘YANKEE DOODLE,’ ” the author notes, “to add to the insult.” A more famous example of the song as taunt is the account of Lord Percy’s troops playing the tune as they marched from Boston ­toward the Battle of Concord, where they unexpectedly met another British regiment in the midst of a retreat. Eventually they, too, were forced to flee, leading a British officer to remark that while they had begun the day playing the song in jest, by the end the Americans “made us dance till we were tired.” This account, reprinted in several newspapers and memorialized in Trumbull’s M’Fingal, transformed the song into a symbol of the colonial forces’ capacity to pull off unexpected victories against their putative superiors. For the remainder of the war, the tune became a staple for American fifers on occasions of British surrender, including at Saratoga and Yorktown.32 At the same time, the act of reclaiming “Yankee Doodle” as an American military theme signified more than simply a jab at the British for losing battles to supposedly inferior soldiers; it was part of a larger and more complex strategy of satiric reversal that had always been central to the meaning of the American versions of the song. Indeed, among the implications of Lemay’s painstaking assembly of internal and external evidence that “Yankee Doodle” originated in colonial New England in the 1740s is that it also demonstrated that the song’s primary satiric point had always been “to reply to English snobbery by deliberately posturing as unbelievably ignorant yokels.” That is, the American versions of “Yankee Doodle” enacted a parody of the metropolitan caricature projected onto colonial Americans. This is seen in the earliest versions of the song, which identified the New England soldiers at Cape Breton by ludicrous biblical names such as “Brother Ephraim” and “Aminadab.” And it is also central to the meaning of the “Visit to Camp” versions of the song that first appeared in the early days of the war, the point of which was to subvert the conventional social and intellectual hierarchy by allowing

82   Chapter 2 American provincials to ridicule the gaze of their ostensible betters as condescending and ignorant. In the context of the question of military readiness, moreover, the ­Revolutionary-​­themed “Visit to Camp” stanzas—​­as most clearly illustrated in the 1775 broadside “The Yankey’s Return from Camp”—​­subtly pushed back against the belief that the colonials were unfit to face their British opponents in battle. At the surface level, the song plays into the Yankee Doodle stereotype by depicting a young boy’s bewilderment as he observes the activities of a military camp presided over by General Washington. The boy exhibits all of the traits of ignorance and cowardice that had been projected onto the American soldiers more generally, such as when he mistakes a cannon for “a swamping gun, / Large as a log of maple,” or when he runs home to his “mother’s chamber” after being tricked into believing that the trenches the soldiers are digging are actually “graves.” Yet at a deeper level the boy performs the caricature against a description of a considerable military operation: among the sights he misinterprets is that of “Captain Washington,” dressed in a fine uniform, with “gentlefolk around him.” For the boy, this suggests that the American commander has “grown so ’tarnal proud,” but for the song’s implied audience, it signifies a more encouraging possibility, that Washington, leading what appears to be a massive army, is hardly distinguishable from a British general: “He set the world along in rows, / In hundreds and in millions.” Thus the song both ironically performs the Yankee Doodle caricature while deflecting and subtly ridiculing the tendency of the British occupiers to project this caricature onto Americans as a whole.33 The competing versions of “Yankee Doodle” make plain the respective strategies of war ballads in general with regard to questions of American identity. Whereas British or Loyalist songs, as we have seen, sought to degrade colonial American identity as socially and culturally inferior, Patriot ballads emphasized the discrepancies between actual and perceived identity. While “The King’s Own Regulars” and “The Battle of the Kegs” worked to undermine the perception of British invincibility, the Patriot variations of “Yankee Doodle” deflected anti-​­American caricatures through a process of simultaneously performing and exposing such distortions as a figment of the imperial gaze. More broadly, the relentless focus on dismantling British identity, as opposed to representing American identity in positive terms, stands as a significant, and perhaps surprising, characteristic of American war songs. On one level, this tendency lends support to Leonard Tennenhouse’s contention

War and Literary War   83 that American literature produced throughout this period is characterized by an unacknowledged acceptance of cultural Englishness. Within this ­reading—​ a­ s in the trend we saw in Chapter 1, in which American poets understood themselves as belonging to a transatlantic tradition of combating moral and political corruption with satire—​­American identity stands as the variation on British identity denoted by its successful avoidance of corruption.34 At the same time, the complex counter-​­burlesque in “The Yankey’s Return to Camp” and other “Yankee Doodle” songs carried important implications for conceptualizing British cultural identity as well: as the song implies, colonial American identity cannot be reduced to the low-​­born stereotype imposed by the British gaze, but the gaze itself—​­defined by a tendency to treat common people with disdain—​­is an accurate representation of a crucial aspect of Britishness. And as we shall see, the act of exposing in poetry a condescending gaze ­toward the people will outlive the Revolution and extend beyond the critique of cultural Britishness alone. Amid the verse wars that will develop after independence, this strategy will prove particularly powerful against a class of Americans whose politics will come to be described by a different term: aristocratic.

Voicing the Revolutionary Debate: The Evolution of M’Fingal The most famous example of the belief in poetry’s capacity to intervene in the outcome of the Revolution is perhaps the oft-​­repeated account of the origins of John Trumbull’s mock epic M’Fingal, especially the poem’s role in lifting the Patriots’ morale at an especially dark period in the war. According to the story, kept alive by Trumbull’s friends long after the Revolution and frequently cited when toasting the poet’s importance to the cause of independence, Trumbull had completed his anti-​­Gage versification in the summer of 1775 when he was entreated by several members of Congress to compose a more substantial satire, which they hoped would “dispel the melancholy that overspread the patriot cause . . . ​[and] ‘set the people laughing.’ ” Trumbull immediately began work on a mock epic that centered on the exploits of a fictional Loyalist; completing it in less than two months, the poet sent the manuscript to his congressional friends in Philadelphia, who saw to its publication in early 1776 under the title M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem. Canto First, or the Town Meeting.35 This account of M’Fingal’s contribution to the war effort goes a long way

84   Chapter 2 t­oward explaining the poem’s unmatched popularity, at least as measured by the more than two dozen editions and reprints of the poem that appeared in the decades following the Revolution. Such popularity, in turn, helps account for Trumbull’s lasting literary fame: well into his later years, he would be feted with “M’Fingal” dinners held in his honor, and his erstwhile friend and literary collaborator, Joel Barlow, would highlight M’Fingal’s “deathless strain” in his 1807 epic, The Columbiad.36 In addition to being the Revolution’s most famous poem, M’Fingal was also its most substantial. Announcing in the 1776 edition that this was the first canto of a longer mock epic, Trumbull made good on this promise, such that the revised, four-​­canto edition of M’Fingal, published in 1782, exceeded three thousand lines, longer than any other wartime poem. In revising the work, Trumbull divided the original edition, which recounts a town-​­meeting debate between the fictional Tory, Squire M’Fingal, and his Patriot opponent, “Honorius,” into two separate cantos (“The Town-​­Meeting, A.M.,” and “The Town-​­Meeting, P.M.”); he then added two additional episodes, “The Liberty Pole,” which relates a run-​­in between M’Fingal and an unruly Patriot mob that detains and tars and feathers him, and “The Vision,” in which the now-​­imprisoned M’Fingal is visited by the ghost of a fellow Tory, who, in a scene reminiscent of the prophetic visions in classical epics, reveals to M’Fingal the future course of the Revolution. The latter cantos of M’Fingal are marked by stark differences in tone and in the targets of Trumbull’s satire, which has led most modern readers to focus on how the revisions to the poem affected its meaning. The critical consensus is that M’Fingal’s evolution reflects Trumbull’s own evolving perspective on the Revolution between 1775, when he was an enthusiastic member of the resistance, to the end of the war, when he was beginning to feel a measure of anxiety over the movement of some revolutionaries ­toward what he saw as unbridled populism and mob rule. Yet while this aspect of the poem’s evolution has been a common topic of scholarly interest, what has rarely been noted is that the 1782 enlargement was not the first instance of revision or literary transformation to characterize the evolution of M’Fingal. In fact, the original single-​­canto edition of 1776 was itself already a kind of revision, for when Trumbull was putting the first version together in the fall of 1775, he drew directly on his anti-​­Gage versification from earlier that summer, in all incorporating some fifty lines of verse from A New Proclamation! into M’Fingal. The evolution of M’Fingal, then, began at an earlier moment than is usually acknowledged, and our understanding of the relationship between the

War and Literary War   85 poem’s evolution and meaning must accordingly begin with the act of transforming the poem from a versification into a mock epic.37 The passages Trumbull adapted from A New Proclamation! into M’Fingal focus on two specific complaints raised by the parodied voice of General Gage: the failure of the British forces to make short work of the rebellion at Lexington and Bunker Hill, and the failure of the British propaganda machine, encompassing the Loyalist press and the clergy, to quash its spirit. Thus, for instance, in his speech to the town meeting, Squire M’Fingal parrots Gage’s own lament that Tory printers like James Rivington and Richard Draper and writers like Samuel Leonard (author of the “Massachusettensis” essays) have failed to convince the rebel faction of the futility of their cause. Insofar as the satiric strategy of the versification form was to use the parodied figure’s own language as a weapon to expose his character, it made sense for Trumbull to put the same strained arguments into the mouth of his Tory apologist, M’Fingal. In doing so, Trumbull ensured that the new poem retained a similar preoccupation with the language of politics and its vulnerability to manipulation. At the same time, by placing such complaints inside a mock-​­epic rendering of a town-​­meeting debate—​­with M’Fingal pitted against a speaker, Honorius, who calls for a unified resistance to the Crown—​ ­Trumbull transformed his own mode of poetic intervention, from enacting resistance through versification to representing the back-​­and-​­forth dynamic of the debate from a detached, third-​­person perspective. Equally important to the early evolution of M’Fingal was the decision to represent the Revolutionary debate in the form of a mock epic, which fundamentally altered the power dynamic between the poet and his subject. Versification, as we have seen, constituted a resistance to authority by an audience implicitly represented in the original document as powerless; mock epic, by contrast, implied a satiric diminishment of its subject. The shift from parody to mock epic thus signified an important moment in the development of Revolutionary War verse more generally, for as is suggested by the poem’s subtitle, “A Modern Epic Poem,” it recast American Loyalists on the whole as paltry heroes of a dwindled age and empire. This is undoubtedly why Trumbull chose to model the new poem, stylistically and thematically, on Samuel Butler’s ­Restoration-​­era burlesque Hudibras, which recounted the exploits of a similarly diminished hero in an earlier military conflict, the English Civil War. Indeed, the opening of M’Fingal closely echoes the opening of Hudibras—​­“When civil Fury first grew high, / And men fell out they knew not why; / . . . ​/ Then

86   Chapter 2 did Sir Knight abandon dwelling, / And out he rode a Colonelling”—​­in its similar description of a squire taking to the road at the onset of a war: WHEN Yankies skill’d in martial rule,

First put the British troops to school; Instructed them in warlike trade, And new manoeuvres of parade; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Boston, in his best array, Great Squire M’Fingal took his way, And graced with Ensigns of renown, Steer’d homeward to his native town.38 M’Fingal follows Hudibras closely in style and tone, which is evident in its tetrameter (as opposed to heroic) couplets and frequent use of feminine and slant rhymes for comic effect (“crown’d head”/”confounded”). More significantly, Trumbull follows Butler in portraying his hero as intellectually arrogant and intransigent, even while exposing the flaws in his rational faculties and capacity to communicate. Even M’Fingal’s Scottish extraction, besides associating him with the “Scots faction” in Parliament led by Bute and Mansfield, alludes to Sir Hudibras’s own religious identity as “Presbyterian true blew [sic]” (which referred to the color adopted by Scottish Covenanters who opposed Charles I and the Church of England). By characterizing M’Fingal in this literary and historical context, Trumbull represents the opposing sides in the current conflict as the precise opposite of their titular identities: the so-​ ­called Loyalist movement is portrayed as the latest embodiment of a long line of Scottish rebels, while their putative rebel counterparts appear as defenders of true English liberty against a British Empire now controlled by Hudibras’s political descendants.39 Yet the most important parallel between the two poems is their similar portrayal of the figures of Sir Hudibras and Squire M’Fingal as respective adherents to the wrong side of history at a crucial turning point, and wholly oblivious to that fact. Published in 1662, soon after the Restoration of the monarchy, Hudibras presented itself as a mock tribute to the entire Commonwealth period, and the irony running through the poem was that it was recounting the last days in power of a petty justice attempting to enforce his dwindling authority. Though the outcome of the Revolution was far from certain when Trumbull began writing M’Fingal in the fall of

War and Literary War   87 1775, the poem similarly announced itself as a mock-​­epic treatment of the waning days of British colonial rule in America. The mock-​­epic aspect of the poem is even more fully registered in the four-​ c­ anto edition of 1782, which, as readers have noted, includes many more classical allusions and epic commonplaces, such as an obligatory comic battle between M’Fingal and a Patriot mob and a vision of America’s future revealed to M’Fingal by the ghost of a fellow Loyalist.40 Yet the 1776 version is also structured around a common epic motif, the debate between M’Fingal and Honorius, which is crucial to the poem’s ideological purpose, as it addresses two important questions facing the Patriot movement in the winter of 1775–1776: should the militias and the newly commissioned army continue in their fight against the occupying British forces, and if so, to what end? Against this backdrop, the 1776 M’Fingal constitutes a satiric response to the larger atmosphere of ideological conflict surrounding the early events of the Revolution, and more particularly, to the mediation of that conflict in public discourse—​­in local town meetings, in the pages of Loyalist and Patriot newspapers, and in poetry. Christopher Grasso has argued that M’Fingal is in large part a satire of the very idea of a “community of speakers” as it was emerging in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This argument is borne out in Trumbull’s various satiric jabs at the New England town meeting as a medium for discursive interchange, which he depicts as an unruly assortment of “Whigs, tories, orators and bawlers, / With ev’ry tongue in either faction, / Prepared, like minute-​­men, for action.” At the same time, such remarks represent only one aspect of the poem’s preoccupation with public communication, which is seen in its extensive catalogue of editors and pamphleteers, from the “scriblers” who “swarm’d round [James] Rivington” in New York to Nathaniel Mills, John Hicks, and “mother [Richard] Draper” in Boston. The very structure of the 1776 M‘Fingal, moreover, alternating as it does between Honorius’s and M’Fingal’s speeches, mirrors the pamphlet and newspaper wars being waged at the time by Samuel Leonard, author of the “Massachusettensis” essays in the Massachusetts Gazette, and John Adams, writing as “Novanglus” in the rival Boston Gazette. Indeed, Honorius opens the debate by echoing Adams’s classical republican and Country Party language of British corruption and decay, comparing “Mother Britain” to a decrepit, senile old woman who, having lost “all the pow’rs she once retain’d,” now vainly asserts an irrational degree of power: “She first, without pretence of reason, /Claim’d right whate’er we had to seize on; / And with determin’d resolution, / To put her claims in execution, / Sent fire and sword, and

88   Chapter 2 called it, Lenity, / Starv’d us, and christen’d it, Humanity.” In response, M’Fingal follows Leonard’s insistence throughout his “Massachusettensis” letters on the illegitimacy of the rights claimed by the Patriots, even citing Leonard directly when he asks, rhetorically, Did not our Scribbler-​­gen’ral strain hard, Our Massachusettensis, Leonard? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Show, clear as sun in noonday heavens, You did not feel a single grievance; Demonstrate all your opposition Sprung from the eggs of foul sedition[?]41 Even as the M’Fingal-​­Honorius exchange mimics the broader atmosphere of debate and response as it had developed in the print public sphere prior to the Revolution, it is important to acknowledge that the debate in verse is far from dialogical in the sense that the term is used in literary studies: as placing disparate voices or discourses in conversation. For as the passage above makes clear, though it recreates the back-​­and-​­forth dynamic of the ongoing Revolutionary debate, it is wholly one-​­sided in its representation. In juxtaposing the “true” republican discourse of Honorius against the “false” ideology of M’Fingal, the poem reinforces a clear discursive hierarchy, one that is further emphasized, importantly, by rendering the debate in the form of poetry. Throughout the 1776 M’Fingal, Honorius speaks in the earnest indignant tone of Augustan high satire, warning, for instance, that nothing will sate their foes’ “mad ambition, / From us, but death, or worse, submission.” In response, M’Fingal ventriloquizes the arguments of Gage and other pro-​ ­British apologists, but does so necessarily as a parodied voice, reproducing Loyalist discourse as a Patriot caricature, such as in his defense of the doctrine of the divine right of kings: Have not our High-​­Church Clergy made it Appear from scriptures which ye credit, That right divine from heav’n was lent To kings, that is the Parliament, Their subjects to oppress and teaze, And serve the Devil when they please?42

War and Literary War   89 Trumbull’s strategy here of creating the appearance of a heteroglot public sphere, while exerting just enough authorial control to allow for only a single satiric truth, would become a regular feature of early republican verse satire, particularly among Trumbull’s circle of fellow Federalist wits, who would organize their Anarchiad and “Echo” series around a similar trope of recreating the workings of the print public sphere in virtual or fictionalized form. Yet in the context of this later development, what is remarkable about Trumbull’s revision of M’Fingal between 1776 and 1782 is his decision to dispense with the controlled monological satire of political propaganda in favor something more closely resembling Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideal of “dialogic heteroglossia” in the four-​­canto version of the poem. First, and most abruptly, the figure of Honorius, who continued to represent the poem’s moral and political center throughout the two “Town-​­Meeting” cantos in the latter edition, drops out entirely halfway through the poem, leaving Squire M’Fingal to engage in two subsequent dialogues or debates, first with members of a Patriot mob who end up tarring and feathering him in Canto 3, and then with the ghost of a real-​ l­ife Boston excise officer named Malcolm, who had been similarly abused by a mob in 1774. When juxtaposed with the Honorius-​­M’Fingal debate of the earlier cantos, these later exchanges complicate both the stability of the political argument from the 1776 edition and the simple Patriot/Tory dichotomy on which that argument had been grounded.43 The most obvious change in Canto 3 of M’Fingal, as numerous readers have noted, is that Squire M’Fingal no longer simply parrots the language of a discredited Tory ideology. Instead, placed in a wholly different discursive s­ituation—​ ­addressing a crowd of drunken Whigs attempting to erect a liberty pole—​­he is transformed into an observant critic of the excesses of radical democracy and mob rule. Calling the assembly the “dupes to ev’ry factious rogue, / Or tavern-​ ­prating demagogue,” he lectures them on the dangers of reducing government to the fickle demands of the many, which, he argues, is merely a license to “make the bar and bench and steeple, / Submit t’our sov’reign Lord, the People.” Here M’Fingal invokes the vox populi ideal, which Patriot poets had lauded as the only true source of legitimate power, and lists all of the ways that this ideal might be manipulated to justify public plunder and violence: Assure each knave his whole assets, By gen’ral amnesty of debts; By plunder rise to pow’r and glory,

90   Chapter 2 And brand all property as tory; Expose all wares to lawful seizures Of mobbers and monopolizers; Break heads and windows and the peace, For your own int’rest and increase; Dispute and pray and fight and groan, For public good, and mean your own.44 In one sense, M’Fingal is simply voicing the familiar critique that originated during the Townshend Act controversy, that the leaders of the resistance were motivated largely by self-​­interest. Yet this moment also stands as a measure of Trumbull’s ideological evolution from the early days of the Revolution, when independence was far from certain and his satiric energies were devoted entirely to cultivating a united rebellion. Writing in 1782 from the vantage point of knowing the outcome of the War for Independence, Trumbull takes stock of many of his fellow revolutionaries’ actions. What elevates the argument above the typical Loyalist assertion that the rebels were motivated by pure self-​­interest is that many of the injustices M’Fingal predicts here had actually taken place over the course of the Revolution: Loyalists were indeed harassed, driven from their homes, and had their property confiscated, all in the name of the public good. More to the point, the critique that an unrestrained populace can deem as a legal right whatever it wishes to do is demonstrated in the course of his exchange with the mob, for when the rebel leaders “speak back” to M’Fingal, they do so in the parodied language of the state. Finding him guilty of the crime of “having grown / The vilest Tory in the town,” they deliver their sentence: “That first the Mob a slip-​­knot single / Tie round the neck of said M’Fingal; / And in due form do tar him next, / And feather, as the law directs; / Then thro’ the town attendant ride him, / In cart with Constable beside him.” Thus does the treatment of M’Fingal validate his earlier contention that the Revolution has reversed the old hierarchy, replacing one kind of tyranny with another: “You’ve push’d and turn’d the whole world up-​­/Side down and got yourselves a-​­top: / While all the great ones of your state, / Are crush’d beneath the pop’lar weight.”45 The difference between the wise M’Fingal of “The Liberty Pole” and the foolish M’Fingal of the two “Town-​­Meeting” cantos depends primarily on the difference between his respective interlocutors and what they symbolized about Revolutionary discourse. Against Honorius’s Country language of Brit-

War and Literary War   91 ish imperial corruption and Republican virtue, M’Fingal can only counter with a Hobbesian defense of self-​­interest as the wellspring of all human action: “Our English writers of great fame / Prove public virtue but a name,” he declares, adding that the real distinction between Patriots and Tories is that the latter alone understand “That self is still, in either faction, / The only principle of action.”46 Yet while this argument undermines M’Fingal’s moral standing in the early part of the poem, it turns out later to be an effective critique of the mob, whose actions reveal precisely the dangers of what might happen if Honorius’s language of public virtue is allowed to diminish into a form of mystification serving only to further the interests of demagogues. Yet if M’Fingal appears at such moments as a clear-​­eyed realist—​­his Loyalism the result of allying his personal interests with the more powerful army—​­this strategy, too, is exposed as a form of ideological delusion in the poem’s final canto, when Malcolm reveals to M’Fingal a vision of the future course and final outcome of the war. As the last of the poem’s discursive interchanges, this dialogue is unique in that it places two versions of Loyalism in a debate over the crucial question facing the Loyalists: whether to continue to place their faith in the army’s capacity to subdue the rebellion or, as so many Loyalists would do, to flee their homes for Britain or Canada. Consistent with the mock-​­epic allusions running throughout the poem, Malcolm plays a role analogous to that of the angel Gabriel in Paradise Lost, revealing to M’Fingal the succession of the war’s unfought battles, from Saratoga to Yorktown. Yet if one purpose of the vision is simply to rehearse the unlikely victories of Gates and Greene and Washington, its larger point is to unmask M’Fingal’s faith in the omnipotence of the British Empire as a delusion that places his own safety in peril: “Too long,” Malcolm tells him, “You’ve dwelt already in delusion. / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ I come to draw thy veil aside / Of error, prejudice and pride./ Fools love deception, but the wise / Prefer sad truths to pleasing lies.”47 Though M’Fingal had prided himself throughout the poem for refusing to be duped by the “farce” of patriotism or the empty “name” of public virtue, in the end, Malcolm’s vision reveals that M’Fingal, too, is the victim of an imperial ideology that has subordinated his true interests to those of politicians thousands of miles away. The evolution of M’Fingal is sometimes described in terms of the poem’s becoming at once more self-​­consciously literary and more “conservative,” which, in turn, is said to reflect Trumbull’s personal poetic aspirations and his growing fear of mob rule in the uneasy early years of the Confederation. This

92   Chapter 2 is true in part, but it leaves out the equally important degree to which the poem evolves into a more complex, multivocal work, representing through its unfolding series of discursive juxtapositions a mix of earnest and burlesqued voices that would continue to speak to American readers for the half century following the Revolution. In one sense, the poem never strays far from its original purpose as war propaganda: the mock-​­epic structure overall and the speeches of Honorius at the beginning and of Malcolm at the end combine to demolish any claim to British imperial entitlement in North America, and emphasize that the new United States has arisen naturally, as it were, from the ashes of a declining British Empire. Yet what makes M’Fingal unique among Revolutionary War poems—​­which accounts, in part, for its popularity after the war—​­is that its competing voices continued to resonate in the context of the ensuing struggles of the new republic, first during the debates over the federal Constitution and then soon after in the partisan conflicts of the 1790s. All sides in these later debates would continue to lay claim to Honorius’s Country Party language as the basis of their own understanding of true republican government. Yet with the outbreak of Shays’ rebellion in the 1780s and the formation of Democratic-​­Republican societies in the 1790s, M’Fingal’s critique of mob rule would appear prescient to emergent Federalists. Yet herein lay the rub for anyone who invoked a version of this mob-​­directed satire: it would forever carry with it the cultural memory of its Loyalist origins. Thus it is that whenever Federalists would warn against the dangers of an unruly populace, as during the French Revolution or the Whiskey Insurrection, they would open themselves up to the charge that they sounded more like a Tory than a Patriot. (In fact, a version of this rejoinder would later be leveled at Trumbull himself in an anti-​­Federalist political farce depicting him as a version of M’Fingal.)48 Given the original intention Trumbull had to use the poem to steer his countrymen in the direction of resistance and independence, such a critique must have been difficult to bear. Yet by representing a Loyalist voice free of parody or caricature, Trumbull created a work that transcended the Revolutionary moment and anticipated the ideological struggles to come. The literary and ideological space opened up by the 1782 M’Fingal—​ ­speculating, for the first time, on the politics of a new American republic—​ ­corresponds, not surprisingly, with the disappearance of an important mode of political verse, Loyalist poetry. This chapter coda may provide a brief note,

War and Literary War   93 at least, on the last examples of this body of verse. The surrender of Cornwallis silenced one of the controlling narratives running through Loyalist poems and ballads: the notion that, despite its setbacks, the British commanders would ultimately bring this travesty of a rebellion to a predictable end. To be sure, British forces still controlled New York for two years after Yorktown, with Rivington’s Royal Gazette continuing to print pro-​­British ballads on the ongoing naval war with France.49 Yet Yorktown marks the moment at which the Loyalist war ballads vanished from the public sphere, displaced by a different kind of song that circulated not in print but in manuscript, among a private group of New York Loyalists anxiously awaiting the transfer of power to the United States. The principal author of such songs was Joseph Stansbury, who had lent his pen to the Tory cause throughout the war, composing songs for meetings of the Sons of St. George and publishing commemorative odes on such occasions as the king’s birthday in Loyalist newspapers. Yet perhaps his most significant contribution—​­particularly as a literary and musical counterpoint to the songs that celebrated the victory of the American forces—​­is a collection of songs discovered among his private papers and made public after the war. These songs poignantly convey the complex mix of emotions arising not simply from the defeat of the British forces but from finding oneself no longer under their protection. There are expressions of hope for reconciliation between the remaining Loyalists and the new American government, as in “The United States”—​­“NOW this War at length is o’er; / Let us think of it no more, / Every Party Lie or Name, / Cancel as our mutual Shame”—​­as well as a few moments of defiance, such as in “God Save the King,” in which the speaker refuses to renounce his loyalty to the Crown whatever the consequences: “Tho’ fated to Banishment, Poverty, Death, / Our Hearts are unalter’d, and with our last breath / Loyal to George, we’ll pray most fervently / Glory and Joy crown the King!” Yet the defining characteristic of Stansbury’s final works of the Revolutionary era is the blend of tragedy and mirth exemplified in his anacreontic song “Let Us Be Happy as Long as We Can.” Here the speaker surrenders his country’s political future to the fates and offers in its place the ancient credo of carpe diem and its corresponding retreat into a self-​­contained world of simple pleasure: Since no one can tell what tomorrow may bring, Or which side shall triumph, the Congress or King;

94   Chapter 2 Since Fate must o’errule us and carry her plan, Why, let us be happy as long as we can. Tonight let’s enjoy this good Wine and a Song, And relish the hour which we cannot prolong, If Evil will come, we’ll adhere to our Plan And baffle misfortune as long as we can.50 Here, in his call to forget the future and enjoy the moment, Stansbury communicates and enacts the retreat of Loyalist poets from the public to the private sphere, and from literature as a mode of political warfare to literature as a source of consolation. And as will become clear later, Stansbury also provides a model of literary retirement that will be taken up by a future generation of poets, many of whom were celebrating American independence in 1783. These are the poets who will awaken to a similar sense of loss over the outcome of a different sort of war—​­one fought over the nature and policies of the new American republic. This war will be waged between factions made up of erstwhile Patriots who, having once assumed the Revolution had been fought over a common set of principles, will discover they had all along been mistaken.

Chapter 3

h Poetry and Conspiracy W

hen poets in the 1760s laid responsibility for the Stamp Act crisis at the feet of an imagined Parliamentary cabal led by Lords Bute and Grenville, they were representing the conflict as one that pitted public interest against the unspoken designs of a powerful few. When their successors, a decade later, caricatured Gage and Burgoyne as ambitious placemen who concealed their real motives beneath bogus arguments about protecting the king’s subjects, they were acting according to the assumption that poetry was an instrument for exposing the truth that their adversaries sought to conceal. And when Jonathan Odell and other Loyalists railed against Congress as an illicit political body, they were tacitly alluding to an older definition of the word “congress,” as a coming together of individuals for nefarious purposes. In short, the poetry of the Revolution as we have examined it thus far was steeped in a decidedly conspiratorial notion of politics. Such examples as these reveal a loose or figurative conception of conspiracy, one that serves primarily as a means of undermining the truth claims of those wielding political power. Yet amid this broad tendency, another subgenre of American political verse took such accusations a crucial step further, purporting to expose a deliberate plot to subvert the will of the people. The outbreak of the Revolution coincided with the appearance of a subgenre of verse best described as a “poetry of conspiracy,” which included a succession of poems by Philip Freneau, all seeking to expose the hidden designs of Gage and his inner circle of military commanders, and a corresponding series of Loyalist poems intending to lay bare the traitorous acts of Hancock, Washington, and the other leaders of the rebellion. Such poems at once reflected and

96   Chapter 3 inflamed the already tense atmosphere of suspicion that pervaded the war, and, as we shall see over the course of this book, would contribute to an equally conspiratorial political environment during the 1780s and 1790s—​ ­one characterized by mutual accusations of secret plots and a mutual conviction that the opposing “faction” posed a lethal threat to the republic. Conspiracy has been a familiar topic in the study of the early American republic, particularly as it relates to partisan warfare. Successive generations of scholars have scrutinized one of the more curious and enduring conspiracy theories in American history, the so-​­called Bavarian Illuminati conspiracy, to which impassioned Federalists appealed in 1798 to explain the hidden connections between the rise of Enlightenment rationalism, the French Revolution, and the perceived threat of radical republicanism in America. Yet the appeal to a broader “logic” of conspiracy was considerably more widespread than this single example suggests; indeed, it pervaded the rhetoric of both proto-​­parties in the 1790s (with the Republican opposition frequently accusing Federalist leaders of plotting to restore monarchy and hereditary aristocracy). This discourse of conspiracy, moreover, exerted its influence on political thought at a much earlier moment: as Bernard Bailyn was the first to point out, Whig pamphleteers of the 1760s and 1770s interpreted the actions of Parliament as “nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty,” and Loyalists were similarly convinced “that they were themselves the victims of conspiratorial designs” by the likes of Hancock and Sam Adams. Far from constituting an extreme or marginal viewpoint, the act of invoking a deliberate conspiracy against the people’s interests was a mainstream theory of political conflict in the eighteenth century.1 That this would be the case is perhaps not surprising when we consider the explanatory power of conspiracy narratives, particularly as a shorthand way of accounting for political causes and effects. For Enlightenment philosophes attempting to explain why the masses continued to surrender their rights and liberties to despots, for instance, it made sense to posit a “conspiracy of kings and priests” to systematically delude the masses; for conservatives seeking to explain the mass popular mobilization of the French Revolution, it made a similar kind of sense to account for this episode as having been directed at a deeper level by an identifiable group of individuals. Beyond this, conspiracy narratives lent concreteness to vaguely imagined threats to legitimate governance. In the specific context of eighteenth-​­century America, in which the leaders of the Revolution were steeped in the civic humanist tradition that

Poetry and Conspiracy   97 held public virtue and disinterestedness as supreme values, one could conceive no threat so dire as that of a narrow faction pursing selfish ends at the expense of the public good. Such leaders were equally troubled by the notion of secrecy: as Bryan Waterman recently argued, the very ideal of a public sphere as a space for open, transparent deliberation was understood against a backdrop of constant fear that secret combinations of men were plotting behind the scenes to influence political outcomes. In this context, to expose such plots, whether in a pamphlet or a poem, was tantamount to defending the foundations of republican government itself. 2 The appearance of such appeals to conspiracy rhetoric in the specific form of poetry may be explained, in turn, by the existence a long-​­standing tradition in English poetry of representing conspiracies in narrative detail. Indeed, one reason why conspiracy theories seemed to make sense to the eighteenth-​ ­century mind is that readers were accustomed to encountering similar conspiracies in literature. The most obvious example of this—​­and the crucial precursor to Revolutionary-​­era conspiracy verse—​­is Paradise Lost, which, despite its obvious differences from political poetry, provided a detailed study of what Milton calls in his epic the “bold conspiracy against Heaven’s King.” More particularly, Paradise Lost offered readers interior access to the characteristic inverted or “diabolical” perspective of the conspirator, as articulated most explicitly in Satan’s famous pronouncement “Evil, be thou my Good.” Such narrative detail provided a model for later poets, both in Britain and America, to interpret the political conflicts of their own times in similarly diabolical terms. Thus, Dryden based his characterization of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the mastermind behind Monmouth’s rebellion, on Milton’s Satan, and Pope alluded to Milton’s legion of devils in The Dunciad in his portrayal of the “conspiracy” of dunces who vowed to supplant learning and morality with “Chaos and eternal Night.” Similarly, poets of the American Revolution portrayed conspiracies by Tory placemen and rebel demagogues as part of a world-​ ­historical drama on which liberty, or imperial order, ultimately hinged. And as we shall see, such poems referenced Paradise Lost directly and frequently, such that, in the words of one representative poet, it appeared for a time that “all Pandemonium” had descended on America.3 Amid a civil war that hinged on the contested meaning of words like “loyalty” and “patriotism,” the Miltonic imposition of moral absolutes served a powerful psychological and epistemological function. In the context of the ongoing struggle between competing authoritative texts, each defending its

98   Chapter 3 own political legitimacy, poems of conspiracy served to affirm the absoluteness of one party’s political truth; by extension, they affirmed the broader belief that political truth was indeed stable, not subject to the back-​­and-​­forth dynamic of public debate in print. This affirmation, as we shall see, relied on a powerful literary fantasy: that a poem could lay before the public a body of evidence that was so compelling as to unite public opinion around a universal set of political beliefs, and in so doing, bring the war to a speedy end. Though this fantasy would rarely play out as the poets themselves imagined, the enduring ideological power of the claim to defend the republic by exposing a fatal plot against its people would ensure the survival of the conspiracy poem as a major subgenre of American political verse. For once unleashed in the context of outright war, the rhetoric of conspiracy would prove impossible to contain after the return to peace, when the attention of political leaders and poets would turn to the work of sustaining a functioning government.

Pandemonium in America When twenty-​­three-​­year-​­old Philip Freneau arrived in New York in 1775, he had few prospects for a professional career, but he had a single overarching ambition nonetheless, to lend his literary talents to the rebellion lately broken out in Massachusetts. Freneau had been writing and publishing poetry since his days at Princeton but had spent the previous few years trying out other, more practical careers. The onset of the war caused him to rededicate himself to writing poetry, more specifically, propaganda poetry. Soon Freneau began publishing one satiric poem after another, all directed against Thomas Gage: the first, as we saw in Chapter 1, was his contribution to the barrage of anti-​ G ­ age versifications, but he followed this effort almost immediately with a series of other verse satires, each composed around a distinctive literary device intended to expose the true villain lurking behind Gage’s public statements.4 Two of the poems in the series are variations on the dramatic monologue. The first, General Gage’s Soliloquy, employs this standard dramatic means of revealing a character’s inner thoughts to portray Gage as a tortured leader, painfully aware that he stands on the wrong side of history. Another, General Gage’s Confession (drawing on the widespread through erroneous belief that the Irish-​­born Gage was a Catholic), depicts the governor in the act of admitting his sins to a priest-​­confessor.5 Yet the most substantial of Freneau’s anti-​ G ­ age poems from 1775 is the narrative poem A Voyage to Boston, which

Poetry and Conspiracy   99 presents Gage as the mastermind of a military cabal made up of actual generals and admirals, and which highlights Freneau himself as the poet-​­spy who eavesdrops on one of their “midnight consultations” and, through the composition and dissemination of the poem itself, exposes their conspiracy to the public. The foregrounding of the public role of the poet is evident from the outset of A Voyage to Boston, as the main character, referred to only as “the bard,” sits lamenting his current confinement—​­“tho’ struggling to be free”—​­before resolving to assert his “freedom, and his country’s rights.” Whether such lines betray Freneau’s actual desire to involve himself directly in the conflict in Massachusetts, the ensuing narrative allowed him to play out such a desire in fictional terms, beginning with the bard’s symbolic “calling” from the “eastern hills.” Heeding the call, the poet travels ­toward Boston and, in accordance with classical genius loci tradition, is greeted on the way by a figure known as the “Genius of the Woods.” The spirit appeals to the poet to “Go, view the dire effects of tyranny” in British-​­occupied Boston, so as to help “spread the soul of freedom thro’ the air, / That each may taste and value if he can, / This sovereign good that constitutes the man.” Yet the most remarkable aspect of this exchange is that the Genius of the Woods assists the bard on his mission by presenting him with a magic vest that will render him invisible: “No mortal eye thy roving step shall trace, / Unseen as ghosts that quit the clay below, / Yet seeing all securely thou shalt go.”6 Anticipating the trope of invisibility from science fiction and the preoccupation with supernatural power in popular culture, this episode may appear to modern readers as something of an anomaly of Revolutionary War literature. Yet in an important sense, the specific power that is imagined—​­to see without being seen, in order to expose what otherwise lay hidden—​­was very much an eighteenth-​­century political and ideological concern. For it is through this unusual plot twist that A Voyage to Boston presents itself as an early example of what Michael Warner has called (in a slightly different context) a “fantasy of publicity”—​­a simple, imaginary solution to the anxieties felt by eighteenth-​ ­century Americans over the putative threat to the social and political order posed by privacy. In this case, the fantasy involves not simply the contrivance of invisibility but the broader insistence, sustained throughout the poem, that only by working vigilantly to bring hidden facts before the public can the self-​­described Patriots protect their country from harm. This is the message, at any rate, conveyed by the Genius of the Woods as he instructs the poet to

100   Chapter 3 listen in on the “consultations” between Gage and his allies and advisers: “Observe their counsels, search their deep designs; / Trace all their schemes, the lawless strength survey / Of licens’d robbers howling for their prey.”7 As the bard hastens to the “dome of state” and sneaks into Gage’s private chambers, the poem turns to representing the coconspirators themselves. What the poem actually records through the poet’s surveillance is not really evidence of a specific plot being carried out as much as a sustained assertion of the general fact that they are conspiring against the public good. Importantly, the poem advances this charge through a series of Miltonic allusions, first by describing the setting in imagery drawn straight from Paradise Lost (“Twelve was the hour,—​­infernal darkness reign’d, / Low hung the clouds, the stars their light restrain’d: / High in a dome a dire assembly sate”) and then by referring to Gage as “chief of all the Pandemonian crew.” The obvious point of the allusion—​­comparing the speaker’s entrance into the governor’s private chambers to a descent into hell—​­is to insist on the demonic or evil aspect of those the poet regards as his enemies; indeed, this basic function of the poem explains the frequent recurrence of similar Miltonic allusions in countless other Revolutionary-​­era conspiracy poems. Such imagery notwithstanding, however, as soon as the poem begins describing the individuals who make up this “demonic” assembly, it becomes equally clear that such figures are meant simultaneously to call to mind a different literary antecedent entirely: Pope’s Dunciad. Thus Gage, whom the poet calls a “mimic chair of state,” receives his fellow chiefs as “dullness, deepest dullness, hover’d round,” first in the form of General Graves, who mutters senselessly about the state of the war, then General Burgoyne, who scrawls meaningless words on a page, and finally Admiral Percy, who “seem’d to snore.”8 From Freneau’s perspective, there was nothing contradictory about drawing simultaneously on both epic and mock-​­epic sources. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the Revolutionary and early republican periods provide a unique literary vantage point for observing the line of literary influence that connected Milton to his Augustan-​­era successors, which, in turn, allowed later poets to employ Miltonic allusions that were themselves indirect or “once removed”—​ ­that is to say, perceived through the comic filter of Dryden’s or Pope’s symbolic demons from Absalom and Achitophel or The Dunciad. Insofar as the English Augustans had referenced Milton as a way of insisting on the deeper seriousness underlying their satire—​­to remind readers that their comic villains posed the same threat to the social order as their more fearsome ones—​­Revolutionary

Poetry and Conspiracy   101 writers like Freneau took this allusive complexity for granted, portraying their own opponents as, by turns, malevolent (thus necessitating all-​­out war against them) and comically inept (thus assuring eventual victory over them).9 Freneau alternates between these possibilities throughout A Voyage to Boston: at one moment, he goes into a lengthy digression comparing Gage’s cruelty to that of Cortez, while at another he relates a ridiculous episode in which the general, complaining about his incessant hunger due to the scarcity of provisions, hatches what amounts to the only real plot of the poem, to steal livestock from nearby farms. Yet despite the suggestion that Gage and his minions represent a diminished threat, there remains throughout the poem a moral logic in which Gage’s purported willingness to use violence against the people justifies an equally violent reaction by the speaker: “What power shall drive this serpent from our shore [?] / This scorpion swoln with carnage, death and gore [?]” Such is also the case in a later passage, in which the speaker, mentioning in passing the word “Tory,” suddenly asks, “What is a Tory? Heavens and earth reveal, / What strange blind monster does that name conceal?” before launching into what can only be described as a moral “vivisection” of an archetypal Tory, whom he compares to another demonic figure, the dragon slain by St. George in medieval lore. In this passage, Freneau combines the poem’s original purpose, to expose a hidden truth, with an altogether different objective, to indulge in a sadistic fantasy of dissecting and examining the “heart” and “entrails” of the enemy: “Surgeon attend with thy dissecting knife, / Aim well the stroke that damps the springs of life, / Extract his fangs, dislodge his teeth of prey, / Clap in your pincers, and then tear away.” In the lines that follow, the speaker symbolically dissects one “organ” after another from the Tory, from his “brazen scull, . . . ​impenetrably dull” and “tortoise brain, no larger than a pea” to his entrails, which reveal the depths of the ­Tory’s treachery and servility: See on his breast, deep ’graved with iron pen, “Passive obedience to the worst of men.” There to his lights direct thy searching eyes, “Slavery I love, and freedom I despise.” View next his heart, his midriff just above, “To my own country I’ll a traitor prove.” Hard by his throat, for utterance meant, I spy, “I’ll fight for tyrants and their ministry.”10

102   Chapter 3 Few passages in Revolutionary poetry encompass the full meaning of the phrase “literary warfare” as much as this one: what begins as a symbolic act of violence ends as a sort of textual interpretation, with the poet reading (and, in turn, publicizing) the characteristic phrases said to be engraved on the Tory’s heart. Yet the passage embodies the dynamic of literary warfare in a more straightforward sense of the phrase as well, for it is also an explicit retort to a similar passage from an anonymous ballad that had appeared several months earlier in Rivington’s New-​­York Gazetteer, entitled “The Whig. A Song.” Though mostly unremarkable in its own right, “The Whig” exemplifies a trope found in Patriot and Loyalist poems alike, of naming and classifying one’s enemy in distinctly moral terms. Anticipating Freneau’s similarly taxonomic question at the beginning of the passage above, the song begins with the question “WOULD you know what a WHIG is, and always was?” It then launches into a lengthy definition of the Whig as “a rebel by nature,” a liar, a cheat, an enemy of law and religion, and even a potential regicide. The ballad also presages Freneau’s characterization of the Tory as a demonic figure, in this case, by declaring the symbolic forefather of the modern Whig to be none other than Satan—​­“To shew that he came from a wight of worth, / ’Twas Lucifer’s pride that first gave him birth”—​­and adding that when the Whig is finished doing untold damage to his country, he will return “to the d-​­v-​­l, from whence he came.”11 This is the context in which “The Whig. A Song” may be seen to anticipate not merely the “What is a Tory?” section from A Voyage to Boston but a host of other poems whose titles betray a similar preoccupation with naming and defining, beginning with (from the Loyalist side) Myles Cooper’s 1775 poem The Patriots of North America: A Sketch and Isaac Hunt’s 1776 work Faction, a Sketch; or a Summary of the Causes of the present most unnatural and indefensible of all Rebellion’s [sic]; the very first excepted. As in the reference to the “first,” or archetypal, rebellion in Hunt’s subtitle, such poetry, almost without exception, calls on biblical typology to identify the Whig or Patriot movement as a version of Satan’s conspiracy against heaven. Beyond this, such poems emphatically take up the issue of the names used to identify the respective sides in the conflict. Cooper’s mocking use of the term “Patriots of North America,” for instance, raises the question of how best to describe those who have taken up arms against their king, while Hunt’s emphasis on “faction” (a word reviled in the classical republican tradition as the antithesis of disinterested public virtue) calls to mind a kind of conspiracy in itself.12 Such emphasis on naming proved particularly useful to Loyalist poets as a

Poetry and Conspiracy   103 way of defining the origin and nature of the rebellion. For among the challenges Loyalists faced was that the common satiric strategy of the pro-​­British war ballad—​­based, as we have seen, on British stereotypes of Americans as clownish upstarts—​­was hardly suited to convincing the American rank and file that the revolutionary leaders did not have their true interests in mind. Thus Loyalist poets like Cooper and Hunt devised a new strategy for distinguishing between “the people” and “the rebels”—​­not surprisingly, by identifying the leaders of the Revolution as a faction or conspiracy, directed not only against the British government but also against the very people they have hoodwinked into supporting them. In The Patriots of North America, for instance, this strategy would be exemplified by the appearance of another metaphor for characterizing the rebellion, in which the typical Patriot is portrayed as a puppet, “Like Punch, who struts, and swears, and roars, / And calls his Betters, Rogues and Whores” but, despite such antics, speaks only his “Prompter’s Sense.”13 By the same logic, Revolutionary leaders such as Hancock and Sam Adams appeared in Loyalist verse as the demonic foils to Bute and Mansfield or Gage and Burgoyne in Patriot verse—​­insidious masterminds of a conspiracy to (in Cooper’s words) “delude / The harmless, ign’rant Multitude” into following their plot “To plunge the Land, in civil Broils.” What deeper motive underlay such a plot? For Hunt, it was the Patriots’ peculiar zeal to “Run down all Order, Government, and Laws,” or as Cooper adds, to “see / One general, glorious Anarchy.” However tempting it may be to regard such language as hyperbole, within the Loyalist ideology underlying this rhetoric, deference to authority was tantamount to upholding cosmic order itself. Indeed, against this backdrop, the nightmare scenario imagined by Loyalist poets—​­given ultimate expression in the following untitled “portrait of a factious demagogue” from the Royal Gazette—​­would be one that begins with political anarchy in the act of overthrowing one’s rightful government, proceeds to moral anarchy through the claims of demagogues to determine “right and wrong” at will, and concludes with the ultimate Satanic transgression, the veneration of those very demagogues as gods: All pow’r and might he understood Rose from the sov’reign multitude. That right and wrong, that good and ill, Were nothing but the rabble’s will. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

104   Chapter 3 If in a tumult they agree, That men from all restraints are free, At liberty to cut our throats, ’Tis sanctified by major votes, To bathe the sword in kindred blood, When it promotes the general good; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Should they in mighty Congress plod To set up HANCOCK for a GOD; A GOD in earnest he must be, With all the forms of deity; The high, the low, the rich, the poor, Must quake and tremble at his pow’r; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Since from the people only springs The right of making Gods and Kings.14 For the author of this poem, as for Cooper and Hunt, anarchy and self-​ ­idolatry are the inevitable results of forgetting the meaning of loyalty as a bond connecting the people and their leaders with God. Yet this same notion of loyalty emerges, in Patriot verse, as disloyalty to the majority of one’s fellow Americans, and as such, a travesty of the very definition of loyalty. This is the argument found in another of Freneau’s poems, “The Loyalists,” which, as the title suggests, also engages in the act of naming and defining the enemy. It is hardly surprising, he writes, “THAT Britain’s rage should dye our plains with gore, / And desolation spread thro’ every shore,” but it is nothing short of appalling that anyone born and bred in the American colonies could align oneself with such a cause: “But that those monsters, whom our soil maintain’d, / Who first drew breath in this devoted land, / Like famish’d wolves should on their country prey, / Assist its foes, and wrest our lives away: / This shocks belief: they are from Satan’s den; / They must be devils in the forms of men.”15 Here again emerges the pattern in Freneau’s poetic thinking wherein the invocation of a violent metaphor to describe the Loyalists (“famish’d wolves” who prey on their country even after having been nurtured by it) leads inexorably to an expression of moral shock and the conclusion that such men “must be devils.” At the same time, such logic reveals the underlying similarity be-

Poetry and Conspiracy   105 tween the Loyalist and Patriot conceptions of loyalty, for like his Loyalist counterparts, Freneau defined the act of turning away from one’s countrymen as an affront to cosmic order: “Can crimes like theirs the power supreme approve, / Whose essence is benevolence and love?” Following the argument found in “The Whig. A Song,” Freneau would predict the return to order as the result of “hotter vengeance” descending upon the Loyalists, but until then he proposes a more practical solution: “Say, shall such traitors in these lands remain? / Ah no, expel them from the ravag’d shore; / Far, far remove them to return no more.”16 Thus would Freneau advocate in poetry an outcome that would actually come to pass, albeit under somewhat different circumstances, with the mass exodus of Loyal Americans at the conclusion of the war. The most ambitious work to take up such issues of loyalty and betrayal was Jonathan Odell’s 1780 magnum opus, “The American Times,” a poem that has been praised in our own time as “the finest Augustan satire to come out of the Revolution.” It was also one of the longest, surpassing seven hundred lines and including numerous satiric portraits of prominent Patriot leaders. As the title indicates, “The American Times” announced itself as the latest example of the Anglo-​­American tradition we have called the “satire of the times,” and indeed, Odell goes out of his way in the poem’s opening to draw a parallel to such literary predecessors as Edward Young, Dr. John Brown, and (as we saw in Chapter 1) Benjamin Church, in his similarly titled The Times: WHEN Faction, pois’nous as the scorpion’s sting,

Infects the people and insults the King: When foul Sedition skulks no more conceal’d, But grasps the sword and rushes to the field; When Justice, Law, and Truth are in disgrace, And Treason, Fraud, and Murder fill their place; Smarting beneath accumulated woes, Shall we not dare the tyrants to expose?17 As with the earlier examples of this motif, the point is not merely to rail against the times but also to locate the present moment within a specific ­literary-​­historical narrative. For a Loyalist like Odell, writing against Patriot poets who viewed their works as the continuation of a tradition that began with the English Augustans and was later taken up by Whig poets on both sides of the Atlantic, the allusiveness of the passage serves to wrest the moral

106   Chapter 3 authority of Augustan satire away from rivals like Trumbull, and back to his own Loyalist side. Beyond this, the first part of “The American Times” reads as a symbolic and thematic response to poets like Freneau: not only does Odell take issue with the conception of treason and loyalty found in “The Loyalists,” he uses his own work to engage in a series of satiric retorts to some of Freneau’s own specific strategies. For example, despite the obvious differences in structure between “The American Times” and A Voyage to Boston, both poems betray a common preoccupation with the idea of the poet as an agent exposing a dangerous conspiracy. Odell even indulges in a supernatural fantasy comparable to Freneau’s invisibility vest. Lamenting that “Bad are the Times, almost too bad to paint,” he turns to charging those responsible; yet rather than simply call them out by name, he imagines himself as possessing a Faustian power to conjure up the demonic spirits of the rebellion: O! for some magic voice, some pow’rful spell, To call the Furies from profoundest hell; Arise, ye Fiends, from dark Cocytus’ brink, Soot all my paper; sulfurize my ink; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They come, they come!—​­convulsive heaves the ground, Earth opens—​­Lo! they pour, they swarm around; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . All Pandemonium stands reveal’d to sight; Good monsters, give me leave, and let me write.18 This act of symbolically summoning the hellish fiends from Pandemonium establishes a narrative structure for cataloguing the vices and crimes of the rebellion’s most prominent leaders, with Odell himself assuming the part of judge in a cosmic tribunal where, one by one, the delegates to the Continental Congress are brought before the bar. Most often, the figurative trial serves to allow the poet to unleash his invective, as, for instance, when he describes John Jay as possessing the “Voice of a lark” but the “venom of a toad,” or when he portrays Hancock and John and Sam Adams as a coven of Massachusetts “Wizards” who, “Sprung from the soil, where witches swarm’d of yore,” busily prepare a noxious brew whose fumes spread the “stench” of rebellion throughout the colonies.19

Poetry and Conspiracy   107 Yet Odell’s ultimate indignation is reserved for George Washington, who is not ridiculed in “The American Times” so much as lectured, in tones that combine a grudging respect for Washington’s martial virtues with extreme indignation over the fact that the would-​­be hero has turned traitor: “Hear thy indictment, Washington, at large; / Attend and listen to the solemn charge: / Thou has supported an atrocious cause / Against thy king, thy country and the laws; / Committed perjury, encourag’d lies, / Forc’d conscience, broken the most sacred ties.” This is jarring language for those used to hearing Washington’s name extolled in poetry, yet it is essential to the poem’s moral calculus, in which (as with Satan in Paradise Lost) the evil brought about by Washington’s rebellion is treated a tragic consequence of his former greatness. Thus does Odell’s tone turn to sorrow as he figuratively reveals the faces of the widows and parents of soldiers slaughtered as a result of Washington’s orders, and then to bewilderment as Odell asks what could have induced him to allow his reputation to be so shamed: “Was it ambition, vanity, or spite, / That prompted thee with Congress to unite; / Or did all three within thy bosom roll, / ‘Thou heart of hero with a traitor’s soul’?” Finally, the poet delivers to the disgraced warrior his sentence of symbolic banishment, which, again, recalls Freneau’s similar move in “The Loyalists.” Yet rather than merely banish Washington from America’s shores, Odell casts him into hell in a passage borrowed directly from the episode in Paradise Lost in which the archangel Michael casts Satan out from heaven: Go, wretched author of thy country’s grief, Patron of villainy, of villains chief; Seek with thy cursed crew the central gloom, Ere Truth’s avenging sword begin thy doom; Or sudden vengeance of celestial dart Precipitate thee with augmented smart. With this symbolic trial and sentencing of Washington, Odell submits what he no doubt hoped would be the last word in the literary debate over which side constituted the treasonous faction and which the true loyalists. In practical terms, of course, this was a debate that would be settled only by the war’s outcome, and Odell indeed imagines such a conclusion in the poem’s final lines. In a passage echoing, once again, the Freneau of A Voyage to Boston, the speaker is met by “Britannia’s guardian angel,” who declares that the “day of

108   Chapter 3 vengeance is at hand: / Th’exterminating Angel takes his stand,” and warns disloyal Americans to repent while they can.20 The deeper significance of Odell’s poetic attempt to expose the traitorous soul of someone like Washington is complicated by the fact that, at the moment he was composing “The American Times,” Odell was also part of an actual ­conspiracy—​­with fellow poets Joseph Stansbury and John André—​­to bring about the defection of General Benedict Arnold. Insofar as the conspirators understood their plot as capable of bringing the war to a speedy end, the prospect of a “day of vengeance” coming to disloyal Americans must have seemed likely to Odell as he was preparing his final manuscript of the poem for publication in July 1780, as part of the same pamphlet that included André’s “The Cow-​­Chace.” The irony, of course, is that the Arnold-​­André affair would prove a very different kind of turning point in the war, one in which Odell’s erstwhile attempt to define the Patriot leaders as “traitors” or “demons” would suddenly and dramatically be drowned out by an explosion of poems that would render Arnold’s name synonymous with disloyalty and treason. Beginning only days after Arnold’s defection, poems began appearing in newspapers and pamphlets from Boston to Providence to Norwich to Philadelphia, all vilifying the fallen general’s character and predicting that his infamy would live on forever: “ARNOLD, thy name, as heretofore, / Shall now be Benedict no more; / Since instigated by the Devil, / Thy ways are turn’d from good to evil. / . . . ​/ . . . / And since of treason thou’rt convicted, / Thy name should now be maledicted.” As is clear from this quotation, as well as from the titles of other prominent anti-​­Arnold verse—​­“Dialogue between Satan and Arnold,” The Fall of Lucifer, an Elegiac Poem on the Infamous Defection of the Late General Arnold—​­such poetry reflected the same satiric strategy of the larger body of “demonic conspiracy” poems: to invoke Satan’s rebellion as the antetype for Arnold’s treachery: So fell that Seraph (who once glorious shone In Heav’n’s gay Zodiac a bright morning-​­star) And, from an angel to a devil grown, With kindred spirits wag’d unnat’ral war; So did thou fall—​­amid the loud applause Of shouting states, in martial glory gay, Thou meanly didst desert thy country’s cause, And basely strive her interests to betray.21

Poetry and Conspiracy   109 While such language as this, we now recognize, was wholly conventional in the context of Revolutionary verse in general, the collection of anti-​­Arnold verse took on a unique cultural significance in the months following the general’s defection. The sheer number of poems—​­upwards of a dozen, ranging in length from a few lines to several pages—​­and the fact that most were reprinted multiple times, ensured that poems decrying Arnold’s infamy were a ubiquitous presence in the print public sphere from October 1780 until the final months of the war. Unlike most other poems of demonic conspiracy, moreover, anti-​­Arnold poems responded not to a vague notion of conspiracy but to a specific, provable plot. More important still, the circumstances of Arnold’s defection did not lend themselves to a literary tit for tat between Patriot and Loyalist poets: amid the flurry of anti-​­Arnold verses, no Loyalist poet came to the general’s defense, and at least one British poet joined in the moral condemnation of Arnold. In a poem from a London newspaper reprinted in Philadelphia, the speaker argues that Britons and American Loyalists should not simply regard Arnold’s defection as a case of a former traitor to the king now returning to the Loyalist fold, for the question remains whether he can ever be trusted by his British allies: “To George a rebel, to the Congress traitor, / Pray what can make the name of Arnold greater? / By one bold treason more, to gain his end, / Let him betray his new-​­adopted friends.”22 Thus were the literary efforts of Odell and others throughout the war to affix the term “traitor” to the leaders of the rebellion suddenly and permanently negated by the near-​ ­universal portrayal of Arnold as the very archetype of the traitor. The symbolic drowning out of the Loyalist conception of loyalty represented more than simply a victory of one conspiracy narrative over another; it was also a triumph of the print public sphere as the ultimate arbiter of warring conspiracy verses. Freneau and Odell had shared a fantasy of penning a poem whose underlying claim to truth would be so compelling that it would effectively end the debate over what constituted political legitimacy, loyalty, and treason. By framing the struggle in absolute or cosmic terms—​­with one side representing a self-​­evidently upright moral vision and the other representing a self-​­consciously inverted one—​­both poets sought to transcend the limitations of literary warfare. So far as such warfare took place within a medium characterized by a potential for a virtually endless series of attacks and counterattacks, this dream of epistemological or moral transcendence was all but impossible. Yet in place of such absolute triumph, something like a decisive ideological victory could nevertheless be achieved through a sudden, collective literary

110   Chapter 3 explosion creating the appearance, through its sheer ubiquity, that one set of values had come to dominate the conflict. And as we saw in Chapter 2, when such a dynamic as this combined with a favorable military outcome (in this case, the surrender of Cornwallis, which came only a few months after the anti-​­Arnold vogue died down) it reinforced the sense that the question was now settled as to which side represented the traitorous faction. By October 1781, not only had the Revolutionary War effectively come to an end, but with it the war of competing conspiracy claims over the nature of loyalty, with each outcome reinforcing the perceived finality of the other. At the same time, as at least one group of political poets would soon discover, it was not necessary the case that such a flooding of the public sphere—​­or the corresponding sense that this signaled the triumph of one ideological position over another—​­had to arise spontaneously, as in the case of the anti-​­Arnold verses. Rather, a similar sense of literary-​­political dominance could be engineered through the deliberate collaboration—​­not to say conspiracy—​­of like-​ ­ inded writers. Such would be the dynamic surrounding another well-​­known m episode in which poetry seemed to anticipate and even help bring about a specific political outcome. In this case, the group of poets who would come to be known as the Hartford Wits would flood Connecticut newspapers with a succession of mock-​­epic poems, versifications, and other parodies, all in an effort to bring about the ratification of the proposed Federal Constitution. And they would achieve this end, importantly, by reviving the genre of conspiracy poetry for a new political context, thus demonstrating to still later generations of poets that the rhetorical power of exposing diabolical conspiracies would prove just as effective as a weapon of partisan warfare as it had during the war.

“The Anarchiad” and the Confederation Crisis One of the most emblematic poems of 1784 (the year the Paris peace treaty went into effect, officially ending the Revolutionary War) came from what might now seem an unlikely source, the emancipated slave poet Phillis Wheatley, who had been known to American readers since the early 1770s mainly as a moral and religious poet. Wheatley had been an ardent supporter of the Patriot cause from the early years of the Revolution, penning a 1776 epistle to George Washington that may have lent a degree of credibility to the claim that the rebellion represented “freedom’s cause.” In reality, of course, many of her fellow African Americans had chosen to fight for their actual

Poetry and Conspiracy   111 freedom under British rule rather than continue as slaves in the independent United States—​­a fact that complicates her 1784 celebration of the war’s end, Liberty and Peace: A Poem. Yet despite this, the poem’s chief sentiment perfectly captures the relief felt by so many after nearly a decade of war: “LO! Freedom comes . . . ​/ . . . ​/ . . . ​/ . . . ​/ She, the bright Progeny of Heaven, descends, / And every Grace her sovereign Step attends; / For now kind Heaven, indulgent to our Prayer, / In smiling Peace resolves the Din of War.”23 Wheatley’s response was replicated in countless other poems appearing in first years of uncontested independent rule, with titles like “The Return of Peace” and “On the Late Peace.” Yet just as Wheatley’s Liberty and Peace hinted at unacknowledged contradictions surrounding the continuation of slavery in a republic founded on liberty, many of the poems celebrating the end of war contained intimations of potential future conflict. Thus, for instance, a poem from a 1785 collection entitled To Perpetuate the Memory of Peace, which begins with a call to “Let Mirth and Joy abound,” ends with a far less mirthful warning to American Tories who might yet wish to “creep / Into your former state.” Similarly, David Humphreys’s 1786 work A Poem on the Happiness of America includes the sort of cautionary advice that would seem more at home in a poem of conspiracy: to “Beware the feuds whence civil war proceeds; /Fly mean suspicions; spurn inglorious deeds.”24 Humphreys’s name is associated with the literary circle known in his own time and ours as the Hartford or Connecticut Wits, which included not only John Trumbull of M’Fingal fame but also two other prominent poets, Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight. Having supported the cause of independence both in their military service and in their poetry, in the war’s aftermath they set out to become the epic poets of the new American republic, with Dwight penning The Conquest of Canaan (1785)—​­technically, a biblical epic based on the book of Joshua but peppered with explicit comparisons between ancient Israel and the “new Israel” of America—​­and Barlow contributing The Vision of Columbus (1787), his epic on the discovery of the New World and its effects over the subsequent centuries, culminating with the founding of the independent American nation. Such works epitomize a brief moment in American literary history when the poetry wars of the previous decade seemed finally over, leaving poets to reflect on the new republic as the fulfillment of earlier literary strains that had prophesied the “rising glory of America.”25 Yet this triumphal vision of independence was challenged almost from the start by the political and economic upheaval of the postwar period, such that

112   Chapter 3 the era of liberty and peace, as sung in the American epic, soon seemed more like a continuation of the war in different terms. The major cause of the discontent of the 1780s, as historians have long pointed out, was money, or the lack of it, the consequence of Congress’s difficulty in managing its war debt. From the moment the First Continental Congress issued certificates of credit in 1775, the value of the government paper credit began its long process of depreciation. In large part, this was because of Congress’s inability to collect taxes (which was left to the individual states), but it was also because the states themselves, far from being in a position to help pay down the national debt, were forced to issue paper credit of their own, thus adding to the problem of overcirculation. For Congress, as for many states, the best hope for raising money lay in the sale of Western land, but this too, exposed problems with the confederation government, namely, its difficulty to resolve competing state land claims. Not only did the possibility of interstate armed conflict arise (such as in the so-​­called Pennymite and Yankee War over rights to Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley), the question of whether to sell state-​­owned parcels brought to the surface the first hint of distinct parties organized around competing interests and ideologies. Advocates for a stronger federal union and currency would soon come to call themselves Federalists, while those favoring a looser coalition of stronger individual states were branded Anti-​­Federalists.26 Further complicating matters was the reopening of trade with Britain after the war: demand for British manufactured goods led to a depletion of hard currency in the American economy, which in turn required even more state-​ ­issued paper money. By 1786, six states had passed laws for the issuance of various amounts of paper money; the most controversial case was that of Rhode Island, due both to the amount of paper issued and to the lengths the state government was willing to go to force creditors to accept its currency (including denying stubborn creditors the right to vote or hold state office). In response, merchants closed their stores rather than accept the devalued money, only to be confronted by mobs of hungry citizens demanding corn and other provisions. As one newspaper reported, “The confusion at present prevailing in the State of Rhode Island . . . ​has become general and is attended with considerable acrimony.—​­Trade suspended; all kinds of business stagnated; and what is still more extraordinary, there [sic] late penal law daily transgressed.” At the other extreme, states that resisted printing money left their citizens with no currency to pay their taxes and debts, thus creating the opposite crisis of farmers in jeopardy of losing their property to foreclosure.

Poetry and Conspiracy   113 This was the case surrounding the most severe response to the crisis, Shays’ rebellion, in which armed militias began shutting down court proceedings throughout Western Massachusetts, which led to deadly clashes with state-​ c­ ommissioned troops who had been called by the governor to keep order.27 In response to these and other crises, a delegation from five states met in Annapolis and issued a call for a comprehensive convention of states to meet in Philadelphia the following May, “to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the union.” As if on cue, in October 1786 several of the aforementioned Connecticut Wits—​­Barlow, Humphreys, Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins—​­began producing a fragmentary series of satires known as “The Anarchiad,” which was intended explicitly to turn public opinion against the rebellion and in favor of the proposed Constitutional Convention. During the course of one of the most decisive twelve-​ ­month periods in American history—​­beginning with the outbreak of Shays’ rebellion and concluding with the signing of the Constitution in September 1787—​­“The Anarchiad” appeared regularly in the New-​­Haven Gazette and was reprinted in at least ten other newspapers from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania. Though the constitutional fight was by no means over when the final number of “The Anarchiad” appeared, the series was nevertheless credited as an important cultural influence on the ratification movement. As Trumbull proudly recalled, the series “had considerable effect on the public taste and opinions,” particularly in “check[ing] and intimidat[ing] the leaders of disorganization.” Whether or not this remark exaggerated the effect of “The Anarchiad” as political propaganda, such accounts of its importance lived on well into the nineteenth century.28 As the title suggests, “The Anarchiad” tells the epic story of “Anarch,” a spirit engaged in a war against the forces of order and public virtue, led by an opposing mythical figure known as “Hesper.” Its theme of war, of course, betrays the rhetorical and ideological carryover from Revolutionary verse, yet beyond this the work depicts Anarch as another in the line of Miltonic antiheroes, whose definition of the good consists of sowing the seeds of discord and lawlessness. The poem’s subtitle—​­“A Poem, on the restoration of Chaos and substantial Night, in twenty-​­four books”—​­references another classic work in the tradition of conspiracy poems, The Dunciad, whose own main character, the goddess Dulness, is similarly identified as a “great Anarch” and the “daughter of Chaos and Eternal Night.” Such allusions served to project onto the post-​­Revolutionary moment the same sense of epic struggle between good and

114   Chapter 3 evil that had earlier characterized the Revolution, even as the new struggle was political rather than military in nature.29 Thus the strategy of the series’ first numbers was to identify the various conspirators of the post-​­Revolutionary era: Daniel Shays and the other leaders of the Massachusetts rebellion; the members of Rhode Island’s Country Party who had initiated that state’s paper money scheme; and finally, the political leaders in Connecticut who were proposing to sell the state’s Western land holdings in a manner that favored the Anti-​­Federal position. Notwithstanding this explanation of its main narrative, even a cursory examination of “The Anarchiad” reveals a work more multifaceted and bewildering than any earlier poem of conspiracy. Such complexity is glimpsed, first, in the issue of the precise title of the work: for what most scholars have come to call “The Anarchiad”—​­a title that implies a single, unified, mock epic—​­in fact appeared in print under the heading “American Antiquities.” The latter title refers to the frame narrative outlined in the first number of the series, which explains that the cited passages from the ancient epic have been recently discovered among the ruins at an archaeological site in the Northwest Territory. Appearing periodically in newspapers, this title more accurately conveyed the loose connection between the putative epic fragments. Nor can “American Antiquities,” strictly speaking, be termed a work of poetry. Rather, it is a mixed satiric work made up of verse excerpted from the fictional epic and mock-​­scholarly commentary by an equally imaginary pedantic annotator (based on Pope’s ridiculous pedant from The Dunciad Variorum, Martinus Scriblerus). Such a structure allowed the individual collaborators first to invent passages from “The Anarchiad” that could be used to comment on the politics of the moment—​­“In visions fair the scenes of fate unroll, / And Massachusetts opens on my soul,” the first lines read—​­and then, to “analyze” such passages from an equally farcical perspective.30 If such disparate elements are enough to belie any sense of formal or generic unity to the series, which was itself described by one of the contributors as a “hotchpot,” even they do not fully encapsulate the satiric complexity of the work in its entirety. For though few scholars have attended to this fact, “American Antiquities” was itself only part of a larger series of satiric writings published by the Connecticut Wits in the New-​­Haven Gazette and elsewhere in the fall and winter of 1786–1787. These largely overlooked verse and prose burlesques—​­with such titles as the “William Wimble Letters,” “The Newsboy’s Eclogue,” and the “Benevolence, Jr.” and “Benevolence, Sr.” letters—​

Poetry and Conspiracy   115 ­ ealt with many of the same political issues as “American Antiquities,” and d approached them from the same political and ideological perspective.31 To read “The Anarchiad” alongside such pieces, I want to argue—​­and, importantly, to read them in the order of their appearance in print—​­is to encounter a unique textual amalgam of allusive, cross-​­referential satiric utterances, all engaged in a complex but concerted effort to drive the direction of the constitutional debate. The formally disjointed nature of “American Antiquities” and its companion pieces has led some readers to question its political and ideological coherence. Paul Giles, for instance, argues that contemporary readers should be less concerned with what the series was trying to say about the political issues of its time than by the fact that its form compromises its “manifest content.” Such a response, though representative of the contemporary critical interest in literary instability, tends to minimize the degree to which the apparent formal or stylistic instability of “The Anarchiad” actually contributed to its political argument. This is seen, first, in the discrepancy between the two competing “works” in question—​­“The Anarchiad” versus “American Antiquities.” For as the first installment of the series explains, the frame narrative of the recently discovered epic functions as a mechanism for commenting on unfolding political events. “The reader will, I dare say, be as much astonished as I,” the fictional annotator remarks, “to find that a poet who lived so many centuries ago should have described with such amazing precision events that have happened in our times.” 32 Beyond explaining the overarching plan of “American Antiquities,” in which each excerpt from the epic references a specific recent event, this apparatus also serves the crucial ideological purpose of invoking an extrahistorical perspective on such events, ostensibly free of the biases of living inside history. This motif permeates the entirety of the series, chiefly through its emphasis on the correspondences between the parallel narratives of the fictional epic itself and of the unfolding events of 1786 and 1787. Viewed from the ancient perspective of a fictional narrative whose opposing values are represented as wholly stable, the events of 1786 could thus be represented as a similar story of order overcoming anarchy. Thus, for instance, the first three installments of the ­series—​­dealing with Shays’ rebellion, the Anti-​­Federalist movement in Connecticut, and the paper money crisis in Rhode Island, respectively—​­are described by the annotator as taken from the earlier books of the epic, in which Anarch appears poised to triumph: “Thy constitution, Chaos, is restor’d; / Law

116   Chapter 3 sinks before thy uncreating word; / Thy hand unbars th’ unfathom’d gulph of fate, / And deep in darkness whelms the new-​­born state.” As the series extended into the winter and spring of 1787, one contributor saw fit to invent the character of Hesper, whose name, taken from the evening star, suggests light in the midst of darkness, and portray him as responding to Anarch’s forces with his own call to his supporters to “crush the factions of the faithless age; / Bid laws again exalt th’imperial scale, / And public justice o’er her foes prevail.”33 Two related patterns stand out in this interplay between the epic narrative and the developing events of 1786–1787. First, the subject matter became increasingly national in scope, such that by the spring of 1787 it extended outward from its original focus on New England to New York and then to the Philadelphia Convention, which was slated to begin on the day following the series’ climactic tenth installment. More significantly, in these later installments the barrier separating the parallel narratives began to dissolve; thus, for instance, “American Antiquities, No. X,” centers on a speech by the character of Hesper to the “principal counsellors and sages whom he had convened in Philadelphia.” With this address to the “sires of nations, call’d in high debate / From kindred realms, to save the sinking state,” the epic story of “The Anarchiad” converges wholly with the history of the new republic, its crucial point being that the latter story has reached its own climactic moment, even as its outcome is yet uncertain: “Ere death invades, and night’s deep curtain falls, / Thro’ ruined realms the voice of Union calls; / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ On you she calls! attend the warning cry:/ ‘YE LIVE UNITED, OR DIVIDED DIE.’ ”34 In casting the confederation crisis as a matter of life or death for the fledging republic, “The Anarchiad” provides a glimpse into a post-​­Revolutionary mind-​­set in which political leaders and writers—​­accustomed to conceiving political struggle according to the stark finality of outright war—​­projected the same sense of momentousness onto the subsequent struggles concerning the formation of a new government. Such urgency was not regarded at the time as extreme, in part large because the possibility of political dissolution or devolution into anarchy or tyranny had long been a feature of the classical republican theory to which most political leaders of the time ascribed. As William Dowling has pointed out, “The Anarchiad” mounts a version of the same argument, going back to Polybius’s notion of the ideal republic avoiding the extremes of tyranny, on the one hand, and direct or radical democracy on the other, that also informed the debates taking place at the Constitutional Con-

Poetry and Conspiracy   117 vention. Thus in Hesper’s address to the “chiefs” convened in Philadelphia, the spirit warns of two possibilities of disunity, the first being that the individual states will become vulnerable to military threats from one of the European empires still vying for control of North America, and be forced to “yield [their] freedom to a monarch’s will.” The other possibility, perceived as equally likely in the wake of Shays’ rebellion, is that the republic will degenerate into mobocracy and lawlessness, where “the factious crowd,” led by “wild demagogues,’ seeks “Th’ extremes of licence, and th’ extremes of power.” As the emphasis on “faction” here indicates, this is not merely a descent into political anarchy but an outcome consciously engineered by an identifiable group of conspirators. Beyond warning about the possibilities of political collapse, Hesper’s speech also calls out such “traitors” who place their own selfish interests before the public good: Stand forth, ye traitors, at your country’s bar, Inglorious authors of intestine war; What countless mischiefs from their labors rise! Pens dipp’d in gall and lips inspir’d with lies! Ye sires of ruin, prime detested cause Of bankrupt faith, annihilated laws, Of selfish systems, jealous, local schemes.35 The question of what distinguished selfish interests from public interests, of course, was a highly contested one during the time of the constitutional debate, with opponents charging that notwithstanding the moral certitude of passages such as this one, the pro-​­constitutional forces were no less beholden to their own self-​­interest. This is why, in addition to railing against the Anti-​­Federalist vision as one in which “every one shall be independent of his neighbor; and . . . ​ every rogue shall literally do what is right in his own eyes,” “The Anarchiad” offered a corresponding positive vision that emphasized the ethic of mutual dependency as the key to uniting the real interests of all segments of society. As it pertained to the issue of paper money, for instance, “American Antiquities, No. III,” sought to define the issue in terms more complex than simply pitting wealthy urban creditors against poor rural debtors: for insofar as the deflating value of paper money posed a problem not only for merchants but also for the Revolutionary soldiers, or their widows, who had themselves been paid in government scrip, the monetary policies put into place in Rhode Island also posed

118   Chapter 3 a threat to the state’s most vulnerable citizens. Or as Anarch states in his inverted tribute to Rhode Island, “Hail! Realm of Rogues, renown’d for fraud and guile, / All hail, ye knav’ries of yon little Isle. / There prowls the rascal, cloth’d with legal pow’r, / To snare the orphan and the poor devour.”36 Such passages ground the political argument of “The Anarchiad” in specifically religious as well as moral terms, reminding readers of the scriptural admonishments to care for the widow and the orphan. Other passages take this argument a step further, drawing on distinctly religious language to account for the failure of Americans to foster an ethic of public virtue. In one speech, Anarch digresses from his main argument to muse on what he describes as a fascinating paradox in the American character, particularly when compared to the British character. The typical Briton, he says, is wholly corrupt, willing to defy any moral law in order to ingratiate himself to those in power; yet he nevertheless exceeds his American counterpart in recognizing the extent to which his own interests are consistent with those of his country as a whole. The American, by contrast, though nowhere near as morally corrupt or cynical, is vulnerable to the opposite impulse—​­hypocrisy—​­in part because his Christian piety has taught him to place his faith in God’s forgiveness: “Long skill’d to act the hypocritic part, / Grace on the brow, and knav’ry at the heart, / Perform their frauds with sanctimonious air, / Despise good works and balance sins by pray’r.” Underlying this passage is a theological argument about the dangers of taking orthodox Protestantism so far in its preference of grace over good works that one gives in to moral complacency. At the same time, the argument also contains a crucial political implication: that the easy tendency of the American to forgive himself extends as well to the public realm, such that he is more likely to “Forswear the public debt, the public cause; / Cheat heaven with forms, and earth with tender-​­laws, / And leave the empire, at its latest groan, / To work salvation out by faith alone.”37 In grounding their political critique against Anti-​­Federalists in a set of religious values to which many Americans subscribed, the Wits sought to imbue the constitutional debate with the same degree of moral absoluteness that had pervaded the conspiracy verse of the Revolution. At the same time, their own political argument remained vulnerable to a powerful countercharge: that the positive vision of public virtue and economic interdependence, both in “The Anarchiad” and in Federalist discourse generally, was itself a form of ideological mystification, disguising as a universal public good policies that favored the same urban professional classes to which the Connecticut Wits themselves

Poetry and Conspiracy   119 belonged. Within this interpretation, the emphasis on the perceived “anarchy” and violence of Shays’ rebellion betrayed a corresponding lack of sympathy for the plight of rural farmers who stood to lose their land. Such rhetoric, moreover, which called to mind the language used by Loyalists against the Revolutionaries themselves, betrayed an inclination t­oward aristocracy that would soon be identified with the Federalist Party as a whole. Indeed, a version of this critique survives to our own time, as in Carroll Smith-​­Rosenberg’s assessment of the confederation crisis as one in which a Federalist-​­dominated press, aligned with the interests of urban merchants, set out first to marginalize small farmers as a self-​­interested faction and then to invent the fiction that the federal Constitution had emerged naturally from “We the People.”38 To counter such charges—​­which effectively recast the Federalists themselves as a narrow faction—​­the “Anarchiad” authors took care not only to avoid explicit references to economic difference as a crucial factor in the formation of the emerging parties but also to emphasize the extent to which the constitutional debate was indeed partisan in the specific sense of pitting rival political leaders (as opposed to people) against each other. In representing the constitutional debate in this way, the Connecticut Wits sought, first, to rebuff any suggestion that the “aristocratic” Federalists opposed the will of the people and, second, to open space for laying their own claim to represent the public interest in exposing schemes being hatched by Anti-​­Federalist politicians. This argument is particularly evident in a passage from “The Anarchiad” in which the Wits write themselves into the unfolding narrative of the constitutional debate, highlighting the success of their own satiric campaign against the Anti-​­Federalist faction. Among the advantages of the looseness of the structure of a series like “American Antiquities” is that it allowed individual writers to respond to new developments as they unfolded chronologically. As this pertained to the chronology of the series itself, it also allowed the Wits to comment on the perceived reception and influence of their earlier installments, as in “American Antiquities, No. VI,” where Anarch warns his minions of a new threat to their cause in the form of a group of young poets mounting a powerful satiric attack against them: More dang’rous foes arise, in Learning’s dress, Arm’d with the pen, and ambush’d in the press. The laughing youth as lessons, learn their page, And age approving smiles, as dullards rage:

120   Chapter 3 Their shafts all poison’d in Pierian springs, Seem now impatient on the bending strings To pierce their foes;—​­their arrows drink the fame Of each unfederal politician’s name. See our best heroes, stagg’ring from the plain, With eyes aghast, in curses vent their pain.39 This is a remarkable moment of eighteenth-​­century metafiction, within which a character inside “The Anarchiad” complains about the influence the epic is having on a real-​­life political debate. Yet this is only one of several passages that highlight the prominence of the series as a force for controlling the constitutional debate. Embedded in this strategy, importantly, is a variation on the claim to represent the vox populi: in this case, it is less an act of invoking “the people” as an already reified entity than a claim that the literary warfare embedded in the series is gradually winning the people over to the Federalist side. There is even a hint in “The Anarchiad” that the collaborators patterned the narrative development of the series in part in response to its growing popularity; thus, for instance, after David Humphreys saw a letter from one of the New York delegates to the Constitutional Convention, reporting that “the Anarchiad, book 23rd is read here, with much pleasure,” the Wits responded by expanding the scope of their satire to attacking the Anti-​ ­Federalist governor of New York, George Clinton, and paying tribute to Alexander Hamilton as the rising scourge of the sons of Anarch.40 Yet the full measure of the Hartford Wits’ self-​­representation in “The Anarchiad” as a unified literary and political movement comes into focus, as noted above, only when the “American Antiquities” series is read as part of their larger barrage of satiric writings published in the New-​­Haven Gazette throughout 1786 and 1787. Importantly, this barrage began not with “The Anarchiad” but with a series of burlesques known as the “William Wimble” letters, the story of which, though somewhat convoluted, may be summarized in brief. A few weeks prior to the publication of the first number of “American Antiquities,” the Connecticut Courant published a letter by one of Connecticut’s leading Anti-​­Federalists, Judge William Williams, who had recently been elected to the state assembly, asking for help in articulating a plan to use the sale of Connecticut’s Western land holdings to settle state-​­incurred (as opposed to federally incurred) war debt. Addressed privately to one of Williams’s political allies, the letter was never meant to be made public, and how it came

Poetry and Conspiracy   121 into possession of the editors of the Courant remains a mystery; at any rate, it appeared to be documentary proof of a plan to sidestep the desires of the newly elected governor and persuade the assembly to support it. The publication of the letter prompted a number of responses by supporters and critics of Williams, including several works of satire, beginning with a verse parody of the letter, signed “William Wimble.” In the tradition of the versification genre, the parody hones in on the issue of political language and its capacity to be manipulated. In the tradition of Revolutionary-​­era conspiracy verse, moreover, it represents the letter as proof of a plot to deceive the legislature and the citizens alike: Dear worthy Sir, —ERE you read more, My letter’s private,—shut the door— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To suit our party, as I shou’d, I’ve told some fibs for public good, If they’re too little or too few, No one can set them right like you—​­ So beg you’ll alter, fix and model, As suits that puzzling piece your noddle, And strain them thro’ your scribbling sieve, That fools who read may all believe.41 This initial satiric utterance was followed almost immediately by a flurry of other satires, which over the course of several weeks combined to create an altogether new literary-​­political dynamic that merged the ideological force of conspiracy verse with the newly realized power of satiric collaboration. A few days after the Wimble parody, another letter appeared in the Gazette, announcing itself as a reply to Judge Williams by his political ally, Joseph Hopkins, and this letter, too, was soon answered by a versification. The difference in this case was that the verse parody was a satire of a satire, the original letter being itself a satiric fabrication. The latter parody was then answered by a letter to the Connecticut Journal by the actual Judge Williams, who protested the theft of his private property; days later, Williams’s protest was followed by the appearance of “American Antiquities, No. II,” in which the fictional annotator explains that while he had originally intended to address the Rhode Island paper money

122   Chapter 3 crisis, he has decided instead to “gratify the Connecticut readers” with a fragment from “The Anarchiad” that deals with the progress of anarchy in their own state—​­which is to say, the plot by Williams and his allies to turn the people of Connecticut against the idea of a stronger federal union.42 Embedded in the same installment of “The Anarchiad,” moreover, was an indirect challenge to the members of the Anti-​­Federalist camp to join in the public debate, as the figure of Anarch urges Wimble and his allies to respond to their Federalist adversaries in a print campaign of their own: “And where is Wimble, earliest squib of fame! / Your tongues and pens must wake the factious flame! / And thou, poor Quack, behold thy efforts fail; / Could one address thy o’erstrain’d wits exhale? / Wake, scribble, print; arouse thee from thy den, / And raise conventions with thy blustery pen.” Though no actual Anti-​ ­Federalists responded in kind to the combined satiric assault of “The Anarchiad” and the “Wimble” letters, this hardly seems to have mattered to the Wits, who continued to represent this unfolding public debate in fictional or parodied form in a string of subsequent burlesque letters and poems. Thus, soon after Anarch’s challenge to Wimble and his allies in “American Antiquities, No. II,” a letter appeared in the Gazette from a figure calling himself “Benevolence, Jr.,” defending Williams against the “evil geniuses” who had attacked him. Of course, this letter, too, was a burlesque that, in the apparent act of reprimanding Williams’s enemies, ends up conceding the folly of his scheme for selling the Western lands. A few weeks later “Benevolence, Jr.,” was answered by “Benevolence, Sr.,” who chides his “son” for the poor quality of his writing and enjoins him to avoid keeping company with “bad poet[s].”43 Within the history of what I have been calling the poetry of conspiracy, the concerted literary efforts of the Connecticut Wits emerges as a kind of literary “counterconspiracy”—​­a deliberate scheme, entered into by a group of poets, to create a fictional public sphere that retained the appearance of a multivocal public exchange but served only to undermine Anti-​­Federalists at every turn. Over the course of several months, the constituent Wits versified the writing of one politician, ventriloquized another in fictional form, parodied that fiction in verse, placed both characters inside a mock epic, ironically criticized their own satiric efforts, and even criticized the criticism. All the while, they incorporated into this polyglot “text” dozens of cross-​­references and inside jokes, including, perhaps most significantly, a series of self-​ c­ onscious representations of themselves as the “Wicked Wits” who were controlling the performance: “There are so many wicked wits and snarling critics,”

Poetry and Conspiracy   123 one of their fictional victims complains, “that peaceable men dare not ever write an advertisement . . . ​for fear of being buffooned and laughed at.”44 This is the first of many occasions in which the Connecticut Wits advertised their collective identity as a kind of satiric trademark, which would live on for two decades as a way of identifying the group, and of identifying their city or state with a particular brand of political verse satire. Within the broader story of post-​­Revolutionary American political verse, the “American Antiquities” series thus stands out as the first to incorporate the element of intentional collaboration into the existing phenomenon of the literary vogue. The poetry wars of the Revolution proved that the spontaneous appearance of a literary genre, or even of a series of similarly themed poems, could help to bring about ideological victories by flooding the public sphere with poetry and effectively overwhelming the opposition with a single political message. The importance of the first iteration of Connecticut Wits to this development was their recognition of the additional advantage of “conspiring” to use the print public sphere to engineer what appeared as a similar satiric explosion but contained a more carefully controlled structure and narrative. As with the literary vogues of the Revolution, the ideological strength of such an endeavor seemed to be confirmed by the outcome of the Constitutional debate. In the wake of ratification, not only did it seem plausible that the Connecticut Wits helped prevent the dissolution of the states, this outcome also reinforced the notion that poets had the power to influence history by influencing the flow of political discourse. As we shall see, this assumption would lead to an even greater proliferation of political verse and literary warfare in the 1790s. Beyond this, the collaboration of the first-​­generation Connecticut Wits introduced another element to the development of political poetry—​­an emphasis on the self-​­conscious enjoyment of satiric collaboration, independent of a work’s political message. In considering the succession of satires appearing in the New-​­Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Courant in the fall and winter of 1786 and 1787, it is clear that the Wits were motivated not simply by political or ideological objectives but also by the sheer aesthetic or comedic pleasure of entertaining themselves and their friends. This latter motivation has led some readers, as we saw above, to suggest that the aesthetic and ideological purposes of the series exist in tension with each other, so much so as to undermine the coherence of the series. Whether one agrees with this conclusion as it pertains to “American Antiquities,” questions surrounding the relationship

124   Chapter 3 between the aesthetic and ideological elements of political verse would prove important in the decade to come, particularly for Federalist wits, who would increasingly be drawn to penning complex literary burlesques meant not simply to influence public discourse but also to amuse their small circle of supporters. At what point might a penchant for indulging in literary complexity compromise a work’s ideological content so as to render it ineffective as a weapon of ideological warfare? This is only one of the questions Federalist poets would confront after 1800, when they realized that neither their satiric virtuosity nor their productivity had been enough to keep their party in power.

Coda: Conspiracy and the Meaning of History The vogue for penning poems of conspiracy represented an attempt to define the war and its respective combatants in terms more conclusive or absolute than was possible within a print public sphere in which (as the poets of the Revolution seem instinctively to have understood) political truth itself was always potentially in flux. It was one thing to go to elaborate lengths to “prove” one’s enemy was a participant in a diabolical plot, but another thing entirely to expect that a rival poet would not level a similar charge against one’s own party. What I have been describing as the Connecticut Wits’ attempt to overwhelm the opposition with satiric texts arose from the political necessity to define their opponents as a mere “faction” while preemptively drowning out the identical countercharge that would inevitably be leveled at their own side. As will become especially evident in Chapter 5, this countercharge will emerge from the first moments of the new federal government, in an anonymous satire accusing the new vice president, John Adams, of harboring a hidden desire to restore monarchy and aristocracy to America. The poetry of conspiracy will continue to proliferate in the early republic, first from opposition poets who distrusted the motives of the new government’s elected and appointed leaders and then, in response, from the Connecticut Wits’ own literary allies and successors. One explanation for this continued atmosphere of mutual suspicion is that the idea of conspiracy was built into the very conception of America’s history as it came to be understood in the wake of the Revolution. This is evident, paradoxically, in one of the earliest attempts to compose a unifying epic of America, Barlow’s Vision of Columbus, which he was writing at the same moment he was contributing pieces to “The Anarchiad” series. As students of

Poetry and Conspiracy   125 early American literature well know, Barlow would within a few years become the apostate Connecticut Wit, departing the United States for Revolutionary France, where he would declare himself an enthusiastic supporter of that cause and a sworn enemy not only of European despots but also of the Federalist Party, to which his old friends belonged. At the same time, the later revolutionary Barlow can nevertheless be glimpsed in The Vision of Columbus in its underlying conception of America’s origins—​­or, more particularly, in Barlow’s conspiratorial understanding of such origins. Presented in the form of a vision of the future revealed to the aging Columbus by a guardian angel, the epic recounts the history of American colonization in the centuries following Columbus’s voyage, culminating, of course, in the War of Independence. At the same time, as scholars have long noted, the poem serves also as an extended tribute to the idea of progressive history, particularly it was as understood within Enlightenment thought. Thus, in addition to stories of the Spanish conquests and the settlement of British North America, the poem is rife with references to scientific, philosophical, and material advancements that are presented, along with the foundation of the American republic, as harbingers of a future utopia of peace and prosperity. Yet as the reader is also aware throughout, this optimistic vision is revealed to Columbus as he sits in a Spanish prison cell, having been unjustly accused by his enemies of plotting against his patron, King Ferdinand. And as Barlow frequently explains, the injustice against Columbus is symbolic of the larger conflict between the agents of historical progress and those who conspire, whether out of self-​­interest or ideological blindness, to impede it. The story of progressive history, culminating in the redemptive creation of the United States is, in short, characterized at the most fundamental level by conspiracies, on the one hand, and heroic attempts to expose and negate such conspiracies, on the other.45 That Barlow bases his epic of America’s origins on such a struggle is a testament to the centrality of the discourse of conspiracy to the very conception of the new republic, and this will only increase in the ensuing decade, as the first party system in the United States will itself come into existence amid an atmosphere of mutual suspicion about the motives of those on the other side. Such an atmosphere, in turn, will ensure that the poetry of conspiracy will flourish in the Federalist era, with Barlow himself contributing one of the first and most memorable examples, The Conspiracy of Kings. Writing from his new home in Revolutionary France, Barlow will recount a centuries-​­long conspiracy by despots and priests to preserve their power by concealing from the mass

126   Chapter 3 of men the truth of their natural rights, liberties, and dignity. To oppose this conspiracy, Barlow and others will insist, the people must be taught to speak a new ideological language or discourse, centered on the core principles of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and the rights of man. For radical Republicans like Barlow, the special importance of this language arises not simply from its articulation of a long-​­suppressed political truth but also from the way it seems to contain the seeds of political empowerment itself. To invoke and internalize “the language of liberty,” such poets will proclaim, is to take the first crucial step t­ oward overthrowing despotic and aristocratic governments ­everywhere—​­including, importantly, the “aristocratic” administration of Washington and Adams and Hamilton.

Chapter 4

h The Language of Liberty T

he years immediately following the formation of the new federal government were marked by parades and public celebrations, from the Grand Federal Procession of 1788 commemorating the ratification of the Constitution to the crowds that gathered to greet President Washington during his successive tours of the Northeastern and Southern states. For those Americans who had coalesced around support for the Constitution, there was indeed much to celebrate: within a single decade, Americans had triumphed in their war for independence, quelled various manifestations of disunity, established a federal government, and elected their first president by nearly unanimous consent. Yet for many, the most historic achievement of the Revolutionary generation was to be found not in New York (the temporary seat of the federal government) but across the Atlantic, in France. As news arrived of the storming of the Bastille and the passage of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, countless Americans came to see the French Revolution as the fulfillment of the broader promise of their own earlier rebellion against Britain, and as a harbinger of similar political revolutions to come. Such logic, not surprisingly, found its way into numerous celebratory songs and poems in the first years of the 1790s. Among the most explicit was a work entitled The Declaration of Independence, which its author, the Universalist minister George Richards, delivered publicly at a Fourth of July celebration in Boston in 1793. Richards’s poem exemplifies the same linguistic referentialism that characterized so much of the poetry of the Revolution. It is at once as a tribute to the Declaration and an extended poetic gloss on the language of the original document, complete with footnoted quotations to

128   Chapter 4 guide the reader through a kind of call and response between the Declaration and the poem’s illuminations on its historical import. More particularly, this textual conversation argues for the essential continuity between the American independence movement and the revolution which had arisen in the intervening period in France—​­and which, in the months immediately prior to the appearance of Richards’s poem, had taken a radical turn in the execution of Louis XVI. Insofar as this development led some American observers to question their earlier sympathy ­toward the French Revolution, Richards attempts to alleviate such anxieties by inscribing both revolutions within a common narrative that minimizes the specific circumstances of either in favor of an abstract, universal logic that explains the necessity of political revolutions in general. Within this narrative, the American rebellion happened because of the inherent evils of “despotism,” and its purpose was to restore not American liberty alone but also what Richards calls “the grand palladium of terrestrial right.” The Fourth of July itself—​­“Grand DAY of DAYS! First born of NATURE’s prime!”—​­is important because it marks the original instance in which “FREEDOM, VIRTUE, energies sublime, / Op’d wide, the lock’d incarcerating jail, / Where bound for ages past, with brazen chains, / Man groan’d.” It is by way of this logic that the historical significance of the Declaration of Independence comes to be articulated through a metaphor comparing it to the storming of the Bastille: And did they burst the dungeon’s door Of one BASTILE? And leave some SECRET key, For TITLED villainy to turn once more, On God’s own image, heav’n created, free: No! no! indeed!1 Poems such as The Declaration of Independence are significant within the broader history of early republican political discourse not merely for their insistence on a fundamental connection between the two revolutions. They also signal a shift in the language used to describe the American Revolution, away from an older language of classical republicanism and ­toward a new political discourse grounded explicitly in Enlightenment rationalism and progressivism. Though this shift is sometimes obscured because both discourses shared several common symbolic terms (most notably “republic” and “liberty”), the distinction between them becomes clearer when one considers the respective

The Language of Liberty   129 historical narratives underlying them. Within the classical republican reading of the American Revolution, as we saw in previous chapters, Americans declared independence in large part as a means of preserving their own public virtue from the moral and political corruption that permeated imperial Britain. Yet insofar as the tendency ­toward corruption was a feature of human nature itself, the preservation of public virtue, even in a newly independent American republic, depended on a sustained struggle against the same inevitable tendencies that had threatened all of the great empires of Western history. In direct contrast, the American republic as understood within Enlightenment progressivism represented nothing less than a redemption from the constraints of past history, for it signified to people everywhere the momentous consequences of breaking the chains of despotism. The American Revolution revealed, in short, the universal truth that human beings are free to discover and develop their own innate capabilities, whether in law, morality, or science, and that these developments carry the promise of the capacity to fundamentally reform society as a whole. Such was the promise underlying the countless proclamations of the French National Convention in the early years of the Revolution, and such was the promise offered by Richards in The Declaration of Independence, for America, for France, and for all nations: “And is fair FREEDOM, to one spot confin’d? / Hath she no TEMPLE but amid the WEST? / Forbid it heav’n! her FANE is human kind; / Her holy ALTAR is on nature’s breast: / Nor will she quit her seat ’mid VIRTUE’s throne, / Till nation after nation hail her as their own.”2 For the thousands of enthusiastic devotees of this emerging discourse of liberty, equality, and the rights of man, such a future appeared possible because the mass of humanity was finally awakening to certain fundamental truths about human nature and capability that had been concealed for centuries. Within the Enlightenment logic underlying this conviction, despots, aristocrats, and priests had maintained their unequal share of power by denigrating human dignity itself, whether through false religious doctrines of human moral depravity or social and political notions about the unfitness of some men for self-​­government. Such superstitions were slowly dismantled over the course of the eighteenth century by several separate strains of thought—​­from Rousseau’s insistence on natural human innocence to Lord Shaftesbury’s assertion that sympathy and sociability were prime motivators for moral conduct—​­setting the stage for a universal recognition of the rights of man. Equally exhilarating for those living during this singular moment in

130   Chapter 4 history was that this new language seemed to contain the seeds of human empowerment within it. For insofar as the attainment of political liberty and equality was seen as dependent on first extricating oneself from the superstitions invented to deny liberty and equality, simply to invoke the discourse of equality and rights was itself understood as a liberating act. Such was the possibility, now on a global scale, of speaking such ideals into existence. The struggle over the meaning of the French Revolution permeated the partisan warfare of 1790s America, with the proponents and opponents of the Revolution aligning, respectively, with those calling themselves Republicans and Federalists. Once again, poetry played a crucial role in this struggle, both as an important mode of discourse in its own right and, as we have seen in previous chapters, as a form uniquely suited to accentuating the linguistic and aesthetic aspects of the debate. Poets who rejoiced in the prospect of a dawning era of liberty and rights could call up the sublime emotionalism of the moment through the use of millennial symbolism and rapturous tones. Those suspicious of this abstract language of liberty, on the other hand, could call attention—​­as their Revolutionary-​­era forbears had done—​­to its status as mere language, wholly at odds with the increasingly violent acts committed by the ostensible defenders of the rights of man. As the news from France became dominated by accounts of massacres and executions, poets waged symbolic war with each other over the question of whether such violence could be justified. Yet remarkably, even amid this heightened sense of the physical and corporeal stakes of political conflict, the poetry wars of the 1790s continued to center on questions of how one should speak—​­about liberty and equality, and about human nature more generally. As we shall see, this linguistic and discursive struggle contained important implications both for the immediate partisan disputes arising in the first years of the new federal government as well as for longer-​­term questions about how to restructure a society long organized around strict hierarchies of race and class.

The Rights of Man and the Logic of Revolutionary Violence Until the news of the execution of Louis XVI and the ensuing Reign of Terror reached the United States in 1793, most Americans viewed the Revolution in France optimistically, reflecting a general sense that it was following a pattern comparable to that of their own: in declaring itself the National Assembly, France’s third estate appeared to be following the lead of the first

The Language of Liberty   131 Continental Congress, and in abolishing aristocracy and suppressing the power of religious orders, it seemed to be remaking France into an American-​ s­tyle republic. In doing so, moreover, the French Revolution appeared to be realizing the most auspicious predictions of a coming “Age of Revolutions,” such as that advanced by the British observer Richard Price in his 1790 work, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution. The United States, Price wrote, had put in place a government “more equitable and liberal than any that the world has yet known,” such that “there is reason to hope these sacred blessings will spread, till they become universal.”3 Nor was this sentiment lost on American poets. After spending most of the 1780s focusing on nature poems, Philip Freneau returned to political verse in 1790 with “On the American and French Revolutions,” a tribute to this symbolic passing of the revolutionary torch. “BORNE on the wings of time, another year / Sprung from the past, assumes its proud career,” he writes, in lines emphasizing neither the American nor the French Revolution so much as the inevitable progress of history that circumscribes both within an even grander story of universal human liberation: “From that bright spark which first illum’d these lands, / See Europe kindling, as the blaze expands, / Each gloomy tyrant, sworn to chain the mind, / Presumes no more to trample on mankind.” The effect of this prospect is both far-​­reaching and decidedly abstract, a vision of a utopian future conveyed almost exclusively by the use of personification: “Science, triumphant, moulds the world anew,” “Dull superstition from the world retires,” and most important, “Time sheds a nobler dignity on man, / Some happier breath his rising passion swells, / Some kinder genius his bold arm impels.”4 In the immediate background of this vision stands the logic of Enlightenment progressivism as given ultimate expression in the mid-​­1790s in the optimistic notion of human moral and intellectual perfectibility imagined by Godwin, Condorcet, and others. Such reasoning begins with the assertion that human nature, far from being permanently corrupted, is, at worst, morally neutral and therefore capable of being influenced by environmental factors. When combined with the broader Enlightenment project of devising new systems for improving human life—​­educational, political, economic—​ ­such a view then allows for an even more thrilling possibility, particularly in the context of political revolution. Insofar as one of the advantages of republican government is that it implicitly requires a citizenry both morally and intellectually adept, the act of replacing a monarchy with a republic can thus

132   Chapter 4 be seen as having an ennobling effect on human nature. This is why, in poem after poem from the early years of the French Revolution, one encounters a version of the formula articulated in Freneau’s oft-​­anthologized 1791 poem “Lines occasioned by reading Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man”—​­that to “pull  .  .  . ​ down kings” is synonymous with “raising up mankind.”5 Playing out the implications of the same logic, Joel Barlow’s Conspiracy of Kings from 1792 articulates both the inherent destructiveness of monarchy and the argument that its demise as a viable form of government will result in a large-​­scale awakening of human dignity. Composed after Barlow had left America, first for Revolutionary France and then for the radical London circle of Paine, Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the poem appeared in separate editions in London, Paris, and New York, encapsulating for an international audience the reasoning behind the Enlightenment promise of a succession of republican revolutions worldwide.6 Monarchy, Barlow declares, is finally being exposed as a system invented solely to maintain an unnatural state of inequality, and as the masses gradually come to realize this truth, it is incumbent upon the remaining apologists for monarchy to give up their pretensions before it is too late. To be sure, this argument had been articulated numerous times before, including in Barlow’s own earlier treatise Advice to the Privileged Orders. Yet what distinguishes The Conspiracy of Kings is the way it communicates the sense of exhilaration shared by the enthusiasts of the French ­Revolution—​­in showing them as having uncovered the great secret that has held ordinary human beings back for so long. This secret, of course, is what we today call ideological mystification, but it is represented in the poem as a deliberate conspiracy of kings to conceal from ordinary people the truth of their moral and political condition. The widespread unmasking of this conspiracy, the poem goes on to say, will make possible the equally thrilling prospect that this system of inequality, which has plagued Europe for centuries, will finally come crashing down. In response to such ideological opponents as Edmund Burke—​­whom he accuses of propagating superstitions such as the divine right of kings to perpetuate this system of inequality—​­Barlow simply declares that their sham is exposed, and that the people are now awakening to the knowledge that their combined power is more than equal to the empty pomp of monarchy: “Show me your kings, the sceptered horde parade,—​­/ See their pomp vanish! see your visions fade! / Indignant MAN resumes the shaft he gave, / Disarms the tyrant, and unbinds the slave.” As in numerous other works from the 1790s, the hero

The Language of Liberty   133 of this passage is MAN—​­the word emphatically capitalized to denote his ascension to precisely the heights of power and nobility once claimed exclusively by aristocrats and kings. At the same time, this is less about gaining political power than about fulfilling the once-​­unforeseen potential of human nature itself, which Barlow articulates in the terms of reclaiming the stamp of divinity on the human soul which had long been denied: “Hail MAN, exalted title! first and best, / On God’s own image by his hand imprest; / To which at last the reas’ning race is driv’n, / And seeks anew what first it gain’d from Heav’n.”7 This is the elevation of man as a form of redemption inside history, a realization that humanity has always been made in the image of God, notwithstanding such debilitating superstitions as original sin and the necessity of an external means of grace. Yet Barlow’s response to this realization is at once paradoxical and wholly representative of the larger body of poems that contemplated the significance of the rights of man during the French Revolution. On the one hand, Barlow is overcome with feelings of sympathy and brotherhood ­toward his fellow human beings: “O MAN, my brother, how the cordial flame / Of all endearments kindles at the name!” Yet on the other hand, he is affected by an almost uncontrollable sense of indignation over the fact that this obvious and agreeable truth has been systematically suppressed for so long. This is why, even in the midst of expressing joy over the coming of a new era of history, he falls back to a tone of outrage or moral shock over the persistence of such injustice in the modern era: “ ’Tis Rank, Distinction, all the hell that springs / From those prolific monsters, Courts and Kings. / These are the vampires nurs’d on nature’s spoils; / For these with pangs the starving peasant toils.”8 In comparing the ideas of rank and distinction to monsters and vampires, Barlow employs a metaphor common to French Revolutionary verse, aimed at associating monarchy with images not merely of shedding human blood but of feeding on it. Though he uses the metaphor specifically to describe the tendency of the privileged orders to hoard their nations’ resources or live off their subjects’ labor, it also implies a willingness to resort to whatever brutal means despots deem necessary to achieve their ends. For if the “extorted dues” demanded by such tyrants are refused, “They bid wild slaughter spread the gory plains, / The life-​­blood gushing from a thousand veins, / Erect their thrones amid the sanguine flood, / And dip their purple in the nation’s blood.” This is the same reasoning, importantly, that governs Freneau’s argument in “Lines occasioned by reading Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man” as his initial tribute

134   Chapter 4 to the implications of Paine’s book—​­“In raising up mankind, he pulls down kings”—​­is immediately followed by a comparison of these same kings to cannibals: they, “source of discord, patrons of all wrong, / On blood and murder have been fed too long.” This act of characterizing his political opponents as violent or bloodthirsty recalls Freneau’s earlier depiction of American Loyalists as “famish’d wolves” who “on their country prey,” and as we saw, in such poems the violence attributed to the enemy served as an antecedent for imagining an equally violent response. The same is true here, as the rhetoric of cannibalistic violence on the part of monarchs serves to rationalize a counternarrative of retribution in which the French Revolution and its successive uprisings will not only eradicate monarchy as a system but also eliminate the individual monarchs themselves: “Advance, bright years, to work their final fall / And haste the period, that shall crush them all.”9 Within the history of American reactions to the French Revolution, the special importance of this “logic of violence”—​­the rhetorical identification of monarchy with bloodshed that is then invoked to justify an equally violent response—​­is that it provided a powerful ideological counterweight to the growing alarm and revulsion expressed after the Revolution took its notoriously violent turn. Until the autumn of 1792, the American poetic response to the Revolution had been unproblematically sympathetic both to the idea of a French Republic and to King Louis himself for his earlier support of American independence. Yet this would change rather suddenly with the September massacres of 1792 and the arrest of Louis and Marie Antoinette, as some observers began to view the Revolution not as a harbinger of liberty and the rights of man but as a chaotic and frightening episode in its own right. “See France’s most terrible condition! / Rent with division on division,” enjoined the New Year’s poem in the Hartford American Mercury in January 1793: “Rage, Rapine, Horror, Stalk around; / The Palace thunders to the ground; / Babes, Parents, Patriots, glut the grave.” Three months later, when news arrived in America that the king had been guillotined, the ideological distance between the Revolution’s growing number of critics and its most unwavering supporters became even more pronounced. Thus, at the same moment the Gazette of the United States was reprinting the tribute to Louis by the British poet John Wolcot, “The Captive King,” and the Columbian Centinel was publishing Sarah Wentworth Morton’s corresponding tribute to Marie Antoinette, “The Captive Queen,” Freneau’s National Gazette blithely announced the execution with the headline “Louis Capet has lost his Caput.”10

The Language of Liberty   135 Among all the discursive modes for responding to the outbreak of revolutionary violence, poetry was especially well suited to the goal of inscribing the episode within a triumphant narrative of liberty, enlightenment, and historical progress, which is perhaps best illustrated in the allegorical ode from 1793 The Decree of the Sun: or, France Regenerated. Most notable about this anonymous work, which was billed as the “First Offering of a Youthful Muse,” is its treatment of the issue of agency with regard to the origins and progress of the Revolution: though steeped in the same Enlightenment language and symbolism as The Conspiracy of Kings, The Decree of the Sun does not recount the origins of the French Revolution by way of Barlow’s human-​­centered story of man’s awakening from ideological slumber. Rather, as the title suggests, the poet imagines the Revolution as arising directly from a quasi-​­divine command by a distinctly godlike sun: THUS was he rambling thro’ the sphere, And watching (what he held most dear) The “rights of man” below; He saw the chains, with which they’re bound, He heaves the groans, the heav’ns resound, “No more shall it be so.”11

In one sense, of course, this passage exemplifies a common tendency in literary responses to the French Revolution, to represent the event as having been brought into being not by human agency but by the impersonal forces of history. Yet The Decree of the Sun is remarkable for the array of distinct rhetorical techniques used to diminish the role of the revolutionaries themselves, whether in the dismantling of the old order or the regeneration of the French Republic. In the imagination of this poet, the revolution begins in allegory, with the sun’s declaration that the oppression of mankind must cease, and proceeds by way of personification, with the emergence of pride and ambition as the reason for the Revolution’s violent turn. It begins when the “proud man,” who longs to elevate himself above his fellows, “makes a sudden breach, / And crowns himself a tyrant, ’bove the humbler reach; / Yet not content, ambition takes a stride, / And opes new prospects to insatiate pride! / From hence proceeds the dismal clang of war.” The outbreak of war is here written into the poem’s inexorable logic, with war appearing as itself a personified figure who “triumphs in his bloody car” and, looking on at the carnage,

136   Chapter 4 “smiles, to think how many souls he’s hurl’d.” This same rhetorical pattern runs through the entirety of the poem, culminating in a passage describing the Revolution as ultimately the work of “FREEDOM”: “The trump of FREEDOM wakes the mind,/ It rides triumphant, on the wind, / And tyrants down are hurl’d.” That such tyrants were being guillotined by authority of the Committee of Public Safety is not to be gleaned from such language; nor does its account of retribution alter the formula for distinguishing between the perpetrators and victims of the worst instances of Revolutionary violence. As the speaker apostrophizes near the end of the poem, the enemies of the Revolution remain, essentially, predators, and the newly regenerated French nation still deserves the name of archetypal innocence: “Yes FRANCE, you’re free, but enemies combin’d, / Compos’d of wretches, dregs of human kind, / Like wolves try to devour: / While you, poor LAMB! Alone oppose their tide.”12 Such a strategy for representing Revolutionary violence, which both vindicates and minimizes the increasingly radical actions taken against the putative enemies of the state, was most persuasive when such acts of retribution were perceived as proportional to the crimes attributed to the Old Regime. Yet the ideological force of such language was put to its greatest test in early 1794 when the news of the Terror—​­mass executions in Paris, massacres of thousands in the Vendeé, and the general climate of fear through which the state exercised absolute control—​­appeared first in American newspapers. That such accounts would spur a collective struggle to make moral sense of the Revolution is perhaps not surprising, for in the words of Michael Baker, the Terror is one of relatively few “master” events in Western historical consciousness that stand “at the very boundary of thinkable,” raising “essential questions regarding humanity’s potential for good or evil.” Such questions concerning the human capacity for evil were at the forefront of many of the initial reports of the episode: in the words of one widely reprinted account by an American witness, the current situation in France presents a “scene dishonorable to human nature. . . . ​[A] spirit of mutual distrust is predominant among the citizens of Paris. . . . ​[E]very man is afraid of his neighbor. . . . ​Not a day passing without some victims of the guillotine more or fewer. . . . ​[T]he place where it stands is almost continually wet with human gore.”13 This is the background against which another strain of American political verse emerged, representing the French Revolution as a whole not merely as alarmingly more radical than its American counterpart but—​­in direct response to Barlow’s rhetoric of the “delusion” of monarchy—​­as a historical fraud in its

The Language of Liberty   137 own right, a mockery of the principles of liberty and rights from which it has ostensibly arisen. In this reading, the French National Convention gave rise to Jacobin-​­led factions such as La Montagne, or “The Mountain,” which, as the New Year’s poem from the Connecticut Courant declared with horror, instituted a series of brutal purges against their political opponents: “Where smiling mid the scenes of strife, / The Mountain whets the deathful knife / And stalking o’er the carnag’d ground, / Stabs Freedom with a fatal wound.” More ironic still, in the name of venerating MAN to near-​­divine status, the Revolutionaries had violated the fundamental dictates of humanity, with the great symbol of this irony being the guillotine itself, the modern technological marvel whose employment mocked the lofty Enlightenment vision that scientific advancements were harbingers of moral progress. This is the point made most witheringly in another New Year’s retrospective, which declares that the world has France to thank for three recent inventions that expedite the flow of information in the modern age—​­the “télégraphe” (a device for sending optical signals over long distances), the hot air balloon, and the guillotine: For has not Telegraphe the merit, To make French feats out-​­race a spirit? Cannot Balloons as high arise, To tell them through th’astonish’d skies? While Guillotine quick lets them know, By headless ghosts, in realms below.14 Against such expressions of moral outrage, some defenders of the Revolution after 1793 contended that the worst accounts of the Terror had been exaggerated or falsified. Yet other Americans reacted by vehemently embracing violence and terror as signs of the Revolution’s success. Significantly, such defenses tended to come from those for whom the moral argument against monarchy, such as that found in poems like The Conspiracy of Kings, was most visceral: for instance, in the aftermath of the execution of Louis, a writer calling himself “Guillotine” advises, “Let us, Americans, who deposed kings, who dared to be free, use the knife freely, that terror to tyrants.” Defenses of the Terror were also more likely to come from those who advocated a more direct democratic system than that provided by the new federal government in America, such as those drawn to one of the many Democratic-​ ­Republican societies that formed in explicit imitation of French political

138   Chapter 4 societies. Amid the countless “civic feasts” sponsored by such clubs to commemorate the storming of the Bastille or to honor the newly arrived French minister, Edmond-​­Charles Genêt, the guillotine was frequently held up as the most effective measure for dealing with the enemies of republicanism, both in France and in the United States. Thus the following toast offered at a civic festival at New Castle, Delaware, ostensibly in honor of the Constitution, and reprinted approvingly in the General Advertiser: “The federal constitution, may it be administered with that true Republican spirit which it was formed, and may every attempt to pervert or subvert it, subject the author to the guillotine.”15 The same environment of civic feasts generated numerous popular songs extolling the Revolution, including a prominent hymn in praise of the guillotine. Following in the tradition of ballad wars going back to the American Revolution and earlier, the song arose as part of a series of republican revisions to the British anthem, “God Save the King,” which began with “God Save the Rights of Man,” written by Freneau in honor of Citizen Genêt. Like many verse parodies and imitations, the song draws its ideological power from its symbolic displacement of the earlier anthem’s identification of national identity with monarchy: in place of the original hymn’s appeal for God to “save our gracious king,” this song calls on God to “save the Rights of Man!” Freneau’s revision, in turn, inspired further imitations, including one entitled “The Guillotine,” said to have been composed by Barlow for a 1794 celebration of French and American citizens residing in Germany. Exemplifying the period’s ever-​­escalating rhetoric of violence, this song transforms Freneau’s vague call for the “fall of tyrants” into an explicit plea for the execution of the British king and queen. It also dispenses with the solemnity of both “God Save the King” and “God Save the Rights of Man” in favor of an oddly mirthful tone as it celebrates the killing power of the guillotine: GOD save the Guillotine,

Till England’s King and Queen, Her power shall prove: ’Till each anointed knob, Affords a clipping job, Let no vile halter rob The Guillotine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Language of Liberty   139 When all the sceptre’d [sic] crew Have paid their homage, due The Guillotine, Let freedom’s flag advance, ’Till all the world, like France, O’er tyrants graves shall dance, And PEACE begin.16 As the juxtaposition of sentiments in these final lines suggest, the destructive force of the guillotine could be regarded as a cause for rejoicing because violence was itself seen as a purifying force—​­terrifying and chaotic, but a means for restoring peace nevertheless. And importantly, the same logic could be applied to other major phases of the French Revolution, such as the subsequent incursions of the Republican army into Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, as poets depicted these campaigns as leading inexorably to a remaking of Europe as a collection of sister republics. Again, this sentiment is given ultimate expression by Freneau in his 1795 poem “The Republican Genius of Europe,” published after the invasion of the Netherlands and the subsequent creation of the Batavian Republic. Situating this event inside the familiar story of the progress of republicanism from America to France and then to the remaining kingdoms and principalities of Europe, Freneau compares the spirit of liberty to an ever-​­expanding conflagration: “In western worlds the flame began: / From thence to France it flew‑‑/ Through Europe, now, it takes its way, / Beams an insufferable day, / And lays all tyrants low.” And though the poem implies that this fire will subside when the necessary work of the Revolution is finished, the thrust of its emphasis is on the devastation itself. By the end of the poem, the “Genius” of republicanism is transformed into a figure resembling a biblical or mythological beast, moving through the European countryside and laying waste to whatever stands in its way: In dreadful pomp he takes his way O’er ruin’d crowns, demolish’d thrones—​­ Pale tyrants shrink before his blaze—​­ Round him terrific lightnings play—​­ With eyes of fire, he looks them through, Crushes the vile despotic crew, And Pride in ruin lays.

140   Chapter 4 Freneau thus concludes the poem with a glorification of total war to eradicate both tyranny and tyrants. Yet importantly, even as he imagines this scene, Freneau is never far from the language of liberty and the rights of man that animated his tributes to the Revolution from its earlier, more innocent, period. Addressing this same “Genius” a few lines earlier, the poet urges the allegorical figure to “pursue the chace / Till reason’s laws restore / Man to be MAN . . . ​/ That BEING, active, great, sublime / Debas’d in dust no more.”17 At the same time, it was precisely the juxtaposition found in Freneau’s poem—​­celebrating destruction on the one hand, while on the other, offering rhapsodic paeans to the sublime nature of man—​­that terrified the critics of the French Revolution and colored their perception of its supporters. Such anxieties would have a permanent effect on the partisan conflict that emerged between pro-​­administration Federalists and the rising opposition identifying itself as more purely republican. For the largely Federalist contingent who expressed alarm over Revolutionary violence, the perceived threat had as much to do with the American republic as the French: what was one to make of the fact that even amid the Terror so many in the United States responded not with revulsion but with eager admiration of its destructive power? And what did it mean that many of these same devotees were organizing themselves into societies and demanding a more direct role in the affairs of state than was outlined in the Constitution? Though the Federalist critique against the Democratic-​­Republican societies would contain many strains, including, as we shall see, a distinct aversion to the “democratic” tendencies advocated by the societies, a crucial source of their distrust of democratization was the outspoken admiration by many of its advocates for violence and the destruction of their enemies. This is the context in which the poets taking aim at Jacobinism would focus their attacks not on Revolutionary violence merely but on the language or discourse they perceived as justifying violence. Such poetry would continue to target the most explicit justifications of violence in Republican discourse and represent it as itself a tool of ideological mystification, capable of transforming ordinary people into killing machines in the service of autocrats like Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet importantly, Federalist verse would also take aim at what otherwise appeared as the more innocuous or affirmative elements of the language of liberty. Some poets would charge, for instance, that the very abstraction implicit in terms like equality or the rights of man rendered them empty signifiers, wholly disconnected from the often ruthless policies enacted

The Language of Liberty   141 in their name. Others would express suspicion ­toward the effusive or affective nature of Republican discourse, inquiring into what this language implied about the strength of character, the rational capability, or even the masculinity of those who invoked it. Such is the reason, as we shall see, that prior to the Terror—​­indeed, before most Americans were aware of the possibility of a partisan divide over the French Revolution—​­the earliest critique of the language of liberty arose over issues of style.

Satirizing the Language of Liberty: “The Echo” and the Return of Versification After a four-​­year hiatus following the last installment of “The Anarchiad,” the Connecticut Wits regrouped in 1791 with a new lineup of wits. With David Humphreys and Joel Barlow in Europe, and John Trumbull having effectively retired from writing poetry, the sole remaining contributor to the earlier series, Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, joined with a group of younger a­ cquaintances—​ ­Richard Alsop, Theodore Dwight, and Elihu Hubbard Smith—​­to produce a new series for the American Mercury entitled “The Echo.” Appearing regularly from 1791 to 1794, with a few additional installments appearing sporadically until 1798, “The Echo” is remembered as the impetus for the countless verse satires produced both individually and collaboratively by this second generation of Connecticut Wits, sometimes pejoratively dubbed the “minor” Wits.18 Within the larger history of political poetry in the 1790s, however, their collective contributions were hardly minor, with Alsop, Hopkins, and Dwight in particular penning more than a dozen mock epics, New Year’s retrospectives and other verses, effectively leading the Federalist satiric campaign for most of the decade. At the same time, this first collective effort, which, as the title suggests, involved “echoing” or parodying articles from newspapers, is important in another sense, as constituting a revival of the signature form of poetic resistance in the Revolution—​­the versification—​­for a new era of partisan political conflict. One of the lessons gleaned by the earlier Connecticut Wits during the period of the constitutional debates, we may recall, was that the political direction of the fledgling republic depended to an enormous degree on the outcomes of public debates fought out in the pages of newspapers. Never limited to arcane matters of policy, such debates involved wide-​­ranging exchanges among a variety of political philosophies or discourses. As we have

142   Chapter 4 seen, by the early 1790s what I have been calling the language of liberty, equality, and the rights of man had established itself as “ascendant,” with speeches and essays invoking this discourse appearing regularly in proto-​ ­Republican newspapers such as the Boston Argus and the National Gazette. This is the discursive environment that explains the reappearance of the versification form in “The Echo” as a strategy for disrupting this process of discursive ascendancy. Following the pattern established by the versifiers of the Revolution, the “Echo” poets would illuminate and ridicule the rhetorical excesses of various expressions of the language of liberty in an attempt to devalue this potentially powerful political discourse as mere language. Yet while this strategy would become obvious to readers by the fourth or fifth installment of the series, the degree to which issues of language would dominate “The Echo” as a whole is evident in the fact that the series originated not as political satire as such but as a vehicle for lampooning literary style. As Alsop would later explain, “The Echo” began in “a moment of literary sportiveness” when the group of would-​­be wits began to take notice of the “pedantry, affectation and bombast” found in many of the “pieces published in the gazettes, which were then the principal vehicles of literary information.” Combining their collective desire to indulge the satiric muses with the loftier goal to “check the false taste in American literature,” the collaborators began extracting from newspapers what they considered to be specimens of bad writing, and “echoing” them in verse. Thus, for instance, the series’ first installment, which targets a particularly extravagant description of a recent thunderstorm: On Tuesday last, about 4 o’clock, P.M. came on a smart shower of rain attended with lightning and thunder, no ways remarkable. The clouds soon dissipated, and the appearance of the azure vault, left trivial hopes of further needful supplies from the uncorked bottles of Heaven—​­. In a few moments the horizon was again ­overshadowed—​­and an almost impenetrable gloom, mantled the face of the skies. . . . ​The majestic roar of disploding thunders, now bursting with a sudden crash, and now wasting the rumbling echo of their sounds in other lands, added indescribable grandeur to the sublime scene. The windows of the upper regions, appeared as thrown wide open, and the trembling cataract poured impetuous down. . . .

The Language of Liberty   143 Like most of the passages parodied in “The Echo,” this one is targeted for its apparent failure to execute its author’s intention, in this case, to represent the scene as grand or sublime. For as the “Echo” poet insinuates, this effort is undermined by the artificiality of the language, most notably in its use of household metaphors, such as “windows of the upper regions” and “uncorked bottles of heaven.” Against this backdrop, all that remains for the parodist is to highlight and develop these bathetic moments for maximum comic effect: But soon the vapoury fog dispers’d in air, And left the azure, blue-​­ey’d concave bare: Even the last drop of Hope, which dripping skies Gave for a moment to our straining eyes, Like Boston Rum, from heaven’s Junk bottles broke, (Lost all the corks) and vanish’d into smoke.19 Even here, however, where the satiric emphasis seems to be directed wholly at the essay’s writing style, it is seen to extend also to the deeper implications of the discourse invoked. For what this reaction to the storm represents more broadly is the sublime affect as theorized particularly by Adam Smith, as a powerful emotion that evinced a corresponding sentiment of benevolence. Beyond its self-​­consciously decorative or poetic language, the targeted author’s response to seeing this thunderstorm is grounded in the assumption—​­wholly consistent with eighteenth-​­century sentimentalism—​­that this scene is worth memorializing precisely because it is naturally affecting to the heart. As the author puts it near the conclusion of the piece, the image presents “the contemplative mind” with a sense of divine beneficence, in the form of an “Angel of Mercy . . . ​dispensing felicity to assembled worlds.” Yet, as the parody brings to the fore, such a view of nature as existing chiefly for the purpose of dispensing human happiness implies an anthropocentric conception of the universe that allows the author to represent himself and his readership as thoughtful souls who are particularly deserving of this quasi-​­divine blessing: “And to the people to reflection given—​­/ The sons of Boston, the elect of heaven—​­/ Presented Mercy’s Angel smiling fair, / Irradiate splendours frizzled in his hair.”20 In taking aim at the passage’s philosophical underpinnings, “The Echo” makes tacit reference to a more long-​­standing conflict, going back to the early decades of the eighteenth century, over the moral implications of believing in

144   Chapter 4 a benignly ordered universe. This notion, associated with eighteenth-​­century Pelagianism in general and the writings of Lord Shaftesbury in particular, asserted that the contemplation of nature inspired powerful emotions that first led the subject to an understanding of nature itself as a benevolent force and then inspired a corresponding feeling of benevolence in the heart of the observer. As the character of Philocles put it in his passionate tribute to nature in Shaftesbury’s 1709 work “The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody,” “O glorious nature! Supremely fair, and sovereignly good! All-​­loving, and all-​­lovely, all-​­divine! . . . ​Thee I invoke, and thee alone adore.” At the same time, even in Shaftesbury’s time, this optimistic view was met with a skeptical counterargument associating such a view with the sin of pride, most notably by Pope in The Dunciad, who similarly took aim at both Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy and the rapturous style through which it was communicated.21 More significantly, Pope’s method for highlighting Shaftesbury’s rhetorical excesses was to reproduce the passage verbatim but to transpose it from prose into verse. Though different in several respects from the mode of versification employed in “The Echo”—​­most notably, the fact that “The Echo” took greater liberties with the language of its targeted texts—​­Pope’s satire of Shaftesbury anticipated one of the central satiric arguments of “The Echo” series: that a crucial purpose of versification was to highlight, and expose the limitations of, prose works that seemed to aspire to loftier, more “poetic,” heights. By the time of “The Echo,” of course, the literary heirs to Shaftesbury’s benevolist ideas and emotional language, the practitioners of literary sentimentalism, were enjoying perhaps their greatest popularity in Britain. At the same time, sentimental writers such as the group collectively known as the Della Cruscans (Robert Merry, Hester Thrale Piozzi, and others) were also prompting a satiric backlash. In the year prior to the appearance of “The Echo,” William Gifford, in his mock epic The Baviad, lampooned the Della Cruscans for their high affect and rhetorical extravagance. Like the “Echo” poets, Gifford identified the Della Cruscans’ style with a naïve conception of human benevolence and sympathy. Yet beyond this, Gifford also associated both with the burgeoning enthusiasm for the French Revolution, as exemplified by Merry’s 1790 work “The Laurel of Liberty.” This is the context in which Gifford, the future editor of the Anti-​­Jacobin, would anticipate a similar turn by the “Echo” poets, from satirizing effusive prose in general to satirizing the language of liberty in particular.22 Their first foray into political satire came in a parody of an essay from a

The Language of Liberty   145 series by the Massachusetts Republican Abraham Bishop entitled “The Truth,” which encapsulated the philosophical and political enthusiasm of the 1790s through an elaborate metaphor declaring the recent birth of the goddess LIBERTY: LIBERTY, that Goddess, which is destined to render happy our

world, was born yesterday:—​­She now lies smiling in her cradle. The angels of benignity attend her infancy, and the face of nature is changed into joy and festivity. . . . ​ She dwells on the principle of NATURAL EQUALITY—​­The voice of NATURE, which is the voice of GOD, says, that “He made of our blood all the Nations who dwell on the face of the earth.” —​­They were all spoke into being by Divine Omnipotence; they are all instamped with his image, and bear the distinguishing mark of reflection, and rationality. To them he gave, without right of exclusion, the surface of the ponderous globe, and the riches of the mighty deep. . . . ​LIBERTY cheers the vale of life; creates in the rational mind the temper of angels; and attunes the soul for the joys of heaven!

As in the first installment of “The Echo,” the parody of this passage concentrates on its controlling metaphor—​­the assertion that the “goddess” Liberty was born yesterday—​­and literalizes it into a crude, earthy narration of childbirth that undermines the original essay’s obvious lofty aspirations: “THE other day there chanc’d a dreadful rout, / For lo! old mother SPUNKY had ‘sent out.’ / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ And to our joy supreme, on yester morn, / A full twelve pounder—​­LIBERTY—​­was born.” In additional to performing this purely bathetic function, the “The Echo” also takes aim at the implications of declaring that Liberty was “born yesterday.” For behind this metaphor stood the larger Enlightenment logic of utopian progressivism—​­the notion that the final decades of the eighteenth century constituted a singularly redemptive moment in history, the crucial first awakening to the truth of liberty and equality that would itself bring about a future of universal brotherhood, in which all men would share equally in all the blessings of the “surface of the ponderous globe, and the riches of the mighty deep.” The message of “The Echo,” by contrast, is that no merely philosophical or political development is capable of effecting such a transformation. Indeed, it makes this point by rephrasing Bishop’s

146   Chapter 4 declaration that Liberty “creates in the rational mind the temper of angels” into a quasi-​­theological creed in which Bishop’s “Nature” displaces God, and “LIBERTY” displaces Christ as the means by which humanity is redeemed: To us [Nature] gave the ponderous globe to light on, To run about and trade—​­but not to fight on And as he gave us life, and being, first Form’d us of clay, and particles of dust; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . But LIBERTY cheers up this vale of woe, With fallen angels fills the world below, Makes us feel tuneful as the toad of even, And bears us poos-​­back to the joys of Heaven.23 Over the next several years, subsequent installments of “The Echo” appeared in the American Mercury and the Connecticut Courant, following a similar formula of ridiculing rhetorically or emotionally extravagant articulations of what the wits considered to be immoderate political or philosophical ideas. Such a conflation of literary and political excesses made sense because, as Edward Cahill has argued, aesthetics and politics were understood at the time as “homologous” discourses, each characterized by a corresponding dialectic of freedom and restraint. That is, in the same way expressions of sublime affect were understood as always in need of proper regulation by reason, effusions about liberty, equality, and the rights of man were understood as subject to similarly dangerous excesses. In the context of “The Echo,” this association usually involved the logic analyzed in the previous section, in which a rhapsodic tribute to the rights of man would lead to an angry response t­oward those perceived as opposing such rights. Though the most obvious examples involved support or criticism for the violence of the French Revolution, “The Echo” also sought out cases of domestic politics in which affirmations of human dignity paradoxically fed expressions of indignation. Thus, for instance, a later installment of the series highlights a speech by Massachusetts governor John Hancock in which he takes particular offense at Congress’s recent act of compelling the state to follow congressional directives for appointing federal electors: “When an act of Congress uses compulsory words with regard to any Act . . . ​by the Supreme Executive of this Commonwealth, I

The Language of Liberty   147 shall not feel myself obliged to obey them.” Though the echo of this speech touched on the political implications of his resistance to federal authority, they gave greater emphasis to his defiant tone: “SHALL I, who not from them my power have got, / SHALL I, obey them?—​­sooner will I rot,” declares the parodied Hancock. The distinctive satiric function of parodies such as this one was to expose what the poets viewed as an emerging political style, characterized by indignation, humorlessness, and paranoia. 24 Before the formation of distinct political parties, the “Echo” poets sought to define the divisions forming during Washington’s first term as depending in large part on style and, by implication, on temperament. Frequently, such stylistic categories as projected by “The Echo” cut against those typically used by historians to distinguish between the respective parties. For example, despite their conservative misgivings about the implications of democratization implicit in the language of equality and the rights of man, the “Echo” poets tended not to represent the nascent Republican opposition as more liberal, particularly in its cultural views. Indeed, one of the recurrent themes of “The Echo” is that it is the opponents of the administration that are most rigidly tied to outmoded ideologies: thus, for instance, the same installment of “The Echo” that satirized Hancock’s Anti-​­Federalist leanings also parodied his opposition to the establishment of a theater in Boston. To the self-​­consciously urbane members of the “Echo” group, Hancock’s antiquated beliefs about the immorality of the theater recalled the most embarrassing aspects of New England’s Puritan past. Or, as the parodied Hancock himself puts it, the act against stage plays should be upheld because it holds to the wise opinions of his Massachusetts forefathers, who in former times proscribed similar transgressions, such as witchcraft and religious tolerance: This State, then Province, pass’d, with wise intent, An ACT, Stage Plays, and such things to prevent: You’ll find it Sirs among the Laws sky blue, Made near that time, on brooms when Witches flew, That blessed time, when Law kept wide awake, Proscribed the faithless, and made Quakers quake.25 In the context of the later accounts of the violent turn of the French Revolution, this depiction of the putative defenders of liberty and equality as

148   Chapter 4 temperamentally akin to the early Puritans would take on an additional level of significance, allowing the “Echo” poets to identity a common tendency ­toward fanaticism or zealotry as the crucial ideological link between the radical Puritans of the seventeenth century and the radical Republicans of the eighteenth. This connection is made most explicit in “The Echo, No. X,” which parodies a letter to the Virginia Gazette by a writer calling himself “Henrico,” who extols the Virginian electors for having unanimously voted to replace Vice President John Adams with a Republican alternative, George Clinton, in the election of 1792. Attacking Adams for his “aristocratic” views, Henrico rejoices that “the principles of Mr. Adams, the late Vice-​­President, are reprobated—​­his book—​­his writing—​­his sentiments—​­his late conduct—​ ­his love of, and his having recommended hereditary aristocracy, are all, all reprobated. The monocrats, aristocrats, highflyers, mushrooms, all hang their heads; . . . ​they who were conspiring to dethrone the sacred majesty of the people.” Recalling the earlier discourse of conspiracy, by which Patriots and Loyalists alike had sought to expose imagined plots against the will of the people, this passage seeks to expose the hidden agenda of so-​­called American aristocrats. At the same time, even as his own side is being associated with Jacobinism, rather than refute this epithet Henrico embraces the term, declaring that though the word “Jacobin” may be intended as “a mark of contumely,” it should be considered a badge of honor. For are not the Jacobins “the authors of the greatest and most glorious revolution of which the annals of history can boast? Have they not loosed the shackles of slavery from thirty millions of people? Have they not fanned the sacred blaze of liberty, in every region of the earth? Have they not dethroned tyranny, monarchy, aristocracy, priestcraft, and all their satellites?” In response, “The Echo” begins by following Henrico’s tribute more or less verbatim—​­“You call the Electors ­Jacobins—​ ­ hat then? / Are not the Jacobins the first of men?”—​­and proceeds by playing w out the implications of what it means to bestow such praise at the very moment that news of the September massacres and the execution of Louis was reaching America: The Jacobins—​­once more I say, are good, Staunch, noble fellows, fond of letting blood, The Jacobins—​­I dwell upon the name—​­ My admiration and my homage claim; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Language of Liberty   149 Do they not publicly to view display, A noble, generous, spirit, every day? Do they not, most politely, go to work In jointing men, as butchers joint their pork? And most humanely, bear, to please the rout, Women, and children’s heads, on poles, about?26 Even as the “Echo” poets increasingly turned their attention to what they viewed as a Jacobin tendency ­toward zealotry and violence, they maintained their satiric focus on the perceived relationship between affective or sentimental language and political or moral transgression. Most often, this involved highlighting the contradiction between justifying violence against tyrants, on the one hand, while asserting a powerfully felt sympathy for humanity, on the other. As one parodied figure asks in a later installment of “The Echo,” shall “the foes of every native right of man” be allowed to abuse the citizens of France as “Murderers, assassins, regicides and rogues; / Merely, because by soft compassion led, / They’ve taken off their hapless monarch’s head?” Yet in other cases the “Echo” poets drew a connection between sentimentalism and other forms of transgression, including those involving gender identity and sexuality. Amid the political warfare surrounding Citizen Genêt’s triumphant tour of America in the summer of 1793, as he was being greeted by crowds of adoring Francophiles and given civic feasts in his honor, Federalist newspapers seized on what they considered special treatment for the French emissary by American officials ostensibly sworn to neutrality. Why, asked “Americanus” in the New York Daily Advertiser, did the sitting governor of South Carolina, William Moultrie, allow Genêt to arm French privateers in Charleston harbor? And what induced the governor, in the first place, to go out of his way to assist a foreign dignitary with whom he was barely acquainted? The answer, offered by “A Frank” in the rival Diary, is found in the natural sympathy that exists between like-​­minded and virtuous men: “As for your astonishment at Mr. Moultrie’s conceiving a friendship for Citizen Genet . . . ​, know that this phenomenon is not new. There exists among men of sensibility and virtue, a certain sympathy and similitude of affections, which quickly forms intimacies between them.” Such an explanation, steeped as it was in the discourse of feeling, prompted in “The Echo” a crude recasting of the original letter’s emphasis on “sympathy and similitude of affections” as homoerotic in nature:

150   Chapter 4 But yet, however it may seem to you, This strange phenomenon is not so new, That man in man should sudden love inspire, And sympathetic feelings wake desire. For ever since that day renown’d of yore, When pale Gomorrah felt the fiery shower, When Lot in terrour from the city fled, O’er Asian climes this manly passion spread.27 Against the backdrop of the more typical critique we have seen employed against the language of liberty—​­that its emotional extravagance opened the way for a corresponding tendency ­toward extreme indignation and violence—​ ­this passage is significant for opening the way to another mode of attack, one centered on the perceived contradiction between emotional affect and prevailing masculine ideals. As David Waldstreicher has noted, this would become a common mode of attack amid the threat of armed confrontation with France during the quasi-​­war of 1798, as bellicose Federalists would suggest a similar connection between Republican “Francophilia” and homosexual tendencies. In one sense, of course, this constituted simply the latest form of policing masculinity that had long pervaded political discourse, from Revolutionary-​ ­era war ballads that disparaged the valor of one’s opponents to the commonplace opposition within classical republicanism between public virtue—​­itself a gendered category drawing on the Latin root vir—​­with the “effeminate” desire for luxury. Against this backdrop, the special importance of this conflation of homoeroticism, sentimentalism, and the French Revolution is that it allowed for a gendered attack against a political opponent based less on how one behaved than on how one spoke: to invoke the Pelagian notion of natural sympathy in the context of political conflict was to render oneself sexually suspect. Ironically, as “The Echo” became increasingly identified as a vehicle for Federalist satire, its signature mode of expression—​­versifying political d ­ iscourse—​ ­would itself come under attack as insufficiently masculine. Almost from its first foray into political satire, “The Echo” had been the subject of counterattacks by poets representing the proto-​­Republican opposition—​­most notably Freneau, who had engaged in a satiric tit for tat with the “Echo” poets in the pages of the National Gazette. A few years later, Freneau’s literary ally, St. George Tucker, the author of a series of satiric odes written in the persona of

The Language of Liberty   151 “Jonathan Pindar,” published an ode “To Echo,” portraying its authors in stereotypically feminine terms. Drawing on the Greek mythological origins of the figure of Echo, Tucker suggests that the series is the work of a “lovely” wood nymph “that haunt[s] unseen, / The lonely forest, and the darksome dell.” Playing out this conceit for the remainder of the poem, Tucker takes especial aim at the versification form itself, comparing the Wits’ act of reproducing political discourse in verse to that of women repeating the words of men as idle gossip. Inviting the personified figure of Echo to “quit thy lonesome haunts, and come to town”—​­a jab at Connecticut as a provincial l­ocation—​­Tucker imagines “Echo” in the federal capital, where, “flippant as a modern female grown, / In Congress shalt thou take thy seat, / And speeches, there, an hour long repeat.” Tucker’s point is that the “Echo” writers have all along been engaged in a frivolous literary endeavor, one that marks them as effeminately passive in relation to the actions of the political figures whose words they repeat. Though “Echo” may succeed in stirring up controversy where she can, Tucker suggests, she ultimately succeeds only in boring her audience with “hour long” recitations.28 Beyond highlighting the intersection of gender and politics in the early republic, the implicit conflict between the “The Echo” and Tucker’s “Jonathan Pindar” points to a deeper conflict over political language itself and the possibility of successfully regulating it by means of poetry. Central to Tucker’s critique of “The Echo” is a diminishment of the power of poetry, as evident in the contrast between the congressmen whose speeches “The Echo” dutifully transcribes and those who scribble their insignificant commentaries on the words and actions of these historical actors. In this sense, Tucker stands as a forerunner of the triumphant Republican poets who would mock their Federalist counterparts after 1800 for having been powerless, despite their incessant croaking, to stem the political tide of the “second American Revolution.” For their part, Federalist poets would continue to labor under the assumption that the people would choose their leaders responsibly if apprised of the political truth, and that nothing revealed political truth so well as the language actually used by politicians. And while the Federalist Wits would continue to engage with the perceived political excesses threatened by the discourses of equality and the rights of man, they would also take note of a tendency by the advocates of the rights of man to limit the application of that ideal to certain marginalized groups.

152   Chapter 4 Empire, Slavery, and the Language of Liberty Though the French Revolution loomed largest as a political and ideological context for “The Echo,” not all of its installments dealt with France. In fact, one of the series’ first forays into political controversy was directed at a newspaper essay that expressed sentiments far removed from the language of liberty. Appearing in Freneau’s National Gazette, the essay was part of a series entitled “Thoughts on the Indian War,” by Hugh Henry Brackenridge. At the time, Brackenridge was serving as a judge in the western outpost of Pittsburgh, and was also in the process of establishing himself as a literary satirist in his own right with his soon-​­to-​­be published novel, Modern Chivalry. Yet the occasion for this essay was entirely serious—​­the wars being waged at the time in the nearby Ohio River Valley against the Miami and Shawnee Indians, and more particularly, the defeats suffered by American forces in 1790 and 1791. Here Brackenridge argues that the United States must resist the advice of those seeking to negotiate with the Native Americans and instead wage all-​­out war until the tribes are either conquered or pushed farther west. In the course of advancing this view, Brackenridge offers a broader commentary on the relations between whites and Indians in the first years of the republic. Brackenridge weighs in specifically on certain views, which he describes as originating from “motives of humanity,” that “call in question the justness of our cause in the war against the Indians,” and argues instead for a renegotiation of treaties more favorable to the tribes. He can excuse such arguments, he explains, because those who present them possess an “idea of the Indian character” no less fanciful or romantic than “young women who have read romances.” Appealing to his ten years’ experience living on the frontier, he declares that the “uncivilized Indian,” far from exemplifying simplicity and virtue, as is often supposed, “is but a little way removed from a beast, who, when incensed, can only tear and devour.” He then defends this position by citing his firsthand acquaintance with Native American leaders who have been invited by the federal government to negotiate: “I know Cornplanter, and Big Tree, and Half-​­Town,” and while “they are good, as Indians,” their loyalty to the United States extends only so far as to whether they can be more effectively bribed by the British. Brackenridge concludes his remarks by asserting that the only real solution to the problem is to wage total war: “The question is, Whether we shall submit ourselves to the savages or they to us? I say, let us

The Language of Liberty   153 conquer because we cannot depend upon them, for the weaker ever distrusts the mightier, and the unenlightened man, the sensible.”29 Appearing soon after this call for an end to appeasement of the Native Americans, “The Echo, No. VII,” pounced on the inconsistency between Brackenridge’s advice and the abstract invocations to the rights of man that were at the same moment appearing in newspapers like the National Gazette. Whatever the merits of Brackenridge’s contrast between his self-​­described clear-​­eyed view of Indians and the “romantic” views of his opponents, the pertinent question, the “Echo” writers suggest, is whether Native Americans ought to be considered human. If so, they should be granted the same rights as those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and similarly claimed by the citizens of republican France. Yet it is clear from his rhetoric, as the “Echo” poets emphasize in their parody, that Brackenridge does not consider Native Americans worthy of such a designation: I Grant my pardon to that dreaming clan, Who think that Indians have the rights of man; Who deem the dark skinn’d Chiefs, those miscreants base, Have souls like ours, and are of human race; And say the scheme so wise, so nobly plann’d, For rooting out these serpents from the land, To kill their squaws, their children yet unborn, To burn their wigwams, and pull up their corn; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Is vile, unjust, absurd—​­as if our God One single thought on Indians e’er bestow’d.30 This is surprisingly modern-​­sounding satire, laying bare not only the brutality of war in general but also the particularly inhumane nature of the U.S. Army’s campaign, which often involved the destruction of entire towns and the massacre of noncombatants such as women and children. Yet deeper still, “The Echo” presents as the fundamental fallacy underlying such tactics the assumption that Indians are so inferior a race as to be inconsequential even to God. And of course, as the explicit reference to the rights of man makes clear, it underscores the hypocrisy of those who would extol the idealism of the French Revolution while also denigrating the very humanity of Native Americans.

154   Chapter 4 In the context of “The Echo” as a whole, this number departs significantly from the typical strategy of satirizing excessively effusive political language, here taking aim at the opposite impulse. Indeed, Brackenridge appears at times to co-​­opt the emergent Federalists’ insistence on the limits of reforming human nature. Yet, as “The Echo” also makes clear, Brackenridge does not apply this criticism universally; he does so in a partial, bigoted way, as is evident in the satiric rephrasing of Brackenridge’s claim that he alone understands the “true” Indian character: “I know Cornplanter, and I know Big-​­Tree, / I know Half-​­Town, and I know all the three: / They’re very clever; but do what you will, / Indians and rum, are rum and Indians still.” Such a view, “The Echo” goes on to say, reduces to nothing more than brute power, which is itself bitterly ironic in light of Brackenridge’s corresponding claim to be representing the more civilized race: The question is, which of us shall obey? Shall we make brooms and baskets?—​­or shall they? I say let’s fight, regardless of their groans, And bring the wretches on their marrow-​­bones; For every man, who lies beneath his foe, Dreads the deep bruising of the fateful blow.31 In light of the “Echo” poets’ own skepticism of those drawn to the effusive language of the rights of man, one may be tempted to conclude that the main satiric thrust has less to do with defending the rights of Native Americans and more to do with exposing the hypocrisy of Brackenridge and other Republicans in excluding Indians from their conception of the rights of man. Yet this installment of “The Echo” belongs to a broader campaign by the Connecticut Wits against the federal government’s heavy-​­handed dealings with the Northwest tribes. Thus, for instance, Lemuel Hopkins’s 1792 New Year’s retrospectives for both the American Mercury and the Connecticut Courant included similar commentaries on the Miami wars. Importantly, such verses constituted a satiric corrective to poems advocating forced “civilization” of the Miami, such as “To Pocahunta,” which presented the mythologized Indian princess as a sort of intermediary between the government and the Ohio tribes, who advises them to “quell” their “fury,” “domesticate” their “roving race,” and “cultivate the soil and quit the chace.” In response, Hopkins focuses

The Language of Liberty   155 instead on the actions of the government, particularly the military strategy devised by Congress to force the Miami to cede their land: But did not Congress hence infer? As wisest bodies sometimes err; That they’d the right since they’d power, From savages the wood to scour: To send St. Clair in highland fury, To scalp without a judge or jury: Who compensates for loss and rout, By telling them he had the gout.32 The most remarkable aspect of this passage is its candid moral critique of both the Congress and the U.S. Army, even to the point of treating General Arthur St. Clair’s defeat as the setup for a joke about how the general blamed his loss in part on a fit of gout. Such willingness to comment humorously on American losses stand in stark contrast to the broader media environment in which losses such as St. Clair’s were memorialized in patriotic and sentimental poems, such as Eli Lewis’ St. Clair’s Defeat. A Poem, which rewrote the story of the battle as massacre against white women and children by “savage men” who “thirst insatiate, for revenge and blood.” In implicit response, the 1792 New Year’s verses in the American Mercury decidedly sympathized with the Indian perspective. Though the speaker laments that many brave American soldiers “have found a desert grave,” he is more emphatic in declaring that given the situation faced by the Miami—​­a forced treaty followed by their removal to a new location farther west—​­it should hardly come as a surprise “That savages will risque their lives, / Merely to save—​­themselves, and wives; / And that the fools had rather die / Than lose their land, or basely fly.”33 Corresponding to this tribute to the Native Americans’ struggle to preserve their lives and culture, the Wits also went so far as to represent the nascent United States as an imperial force not unlike Britain during the Revolutionary War—​­“How Britain like, we’ve laid the lash on, / At once to learn them our compassion”—​­and motivated, importantly, by equally base impulses. As the same poet insists, the root cause behind the entire push for settling the West and removing the tribes is the frenzy of land speculation, by which some men become exceedingly rich and members of Congress get

156   Chapter 4 credit for paying down the national debt, while the Indians are left as the expendable party: Proceed brave sir—​­such speculation, Will pay the whole debt of the nation: While we enjoy the pleasing hope Of buying all the Indians up—​­ And when they’re ours, we’ll make them civil, Or drive them headlong to the devil.34 This strain of Federalist verse has been largely overlooked by historians who have tended to emphasize the opposing impulse in Federalist rhetoric, as was most prominent during the quasi-​­war of 1798, of invoking militarism and patriotism to mobilize support for war against France. Yet the discursive environment of the latter part of the decade, as we shall see, differed considerably from that of the early 1790s, in which ascendant Republicans were leading the calls for war, first against Native Americans and then, during the Jay Treaty controversy, against the British. At such moments—​­as well as a decade or more later, during the embargo crisis of 1807 and the War of 1812—​ ­Federalist poets were more likely to risk being branded as disloyal in order to register their protest against what they regarded as irresponsible or immoral military policy. The other humanitarian issue for which Federalists, particularly in New England, have been credited for their early involvement is, of course, the abolition of slavery. And while the “Echo” poets and their allies were among the first to support the slave rebellion taking place in St. Domingue, and would eventually develop a comprehensive critique both against slavery and the political hegemony of the slave-​­owning states, their response to issues of race in the early 1790s would be complicated by the influence of French Revolutionary rhetoric as it pertained to the issue of racial equality. In the first years of the new government, proto-​­Federalists and proto-​ ­Republicans in the North contributed to the emergence of antislavery poetry and prose in newspapers and pamphlets—​­with many, though not all, being reprints of British abolitionist literature. Poems lamenting the slave trade and the plight of North American and West Indian slaves alike appeared regularly as pamphlets and in Northern newspapers in these years, with little correlation between antislavery views and emerging political affiliations.35 The Connecticut Wits were the first to lend support to the slave revolt in

The Language of Liberty   157 St. Domingue, and their response is all the more remarkable in light of the general alarm expressed in the American press by writers fearing the possibility of similar slave uprisings in the United States. Most reports from Hispaniola in late 1791 described the slaves as “glutting their diabolical revenge” on the planters, and they celebrated the “Sanguinary News” of a backlash against the revolt. Not so the Connecticut Courant, whose 1792 “News Lad’s Address” represented the rebellion as a welcome revival of the goddess of Liberty in a place where she had once appeared suffocated by the white landowning class. In this telling of the event, the “Negroes” of St. Domingue fed medicine to Liberty to “ope and ease her teeming thorax,” after which the goddess, “by gaining breath, / . . . ​lugg’d out damn’d oppression’s teeth.” Turning to the reaction to the rebellion in America, the poet adds that, as a result, human traffickers repine, Lest freedom should on slavery win; Lest Afric’s sons should with a vengeance, Prove their right to independence; A right, with which is stamp’d their souls, As well as French or Spanish Creoles. Within this counternarrative, the anxiety registered elsewhere, both over the violence of the revolt and the possibility of its inspiring similar rebellions in the United States, belongs chiefly to “human traffickers,” whose principal fear is that the blessings of liberty and independence may soon be considered to belong equally to Africans and Europeans alike. Indeed, the newsboy concludes with an earnest prayer for precisely this outcome, suggesting that God would approve of the establishment of the first free black republic in the Western Hemisphere: “May heaven still guide and guard and lead ’em / In triumph on the road to freedom; / For no one likes to serve his betters, / When lash’d with whips and gall’d with fetters.”36 With regard to the intersection of slavery and politics in the period, this passage marks the beginning of what would later play out as a major policy dispute between the Federalist and Republican parties over America’s relationship with the nascent Republic of Haiti under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. For despite the early optimism for the rebellion expressed by some prominent Northern Republicans (most notably Abraham Bishop, who published a series in the Boston Argus entitled “The Rights of Black Men”), over the

158   Chapter 4 course of the decade, their party increasingly came under the leadership of Virginia slaveholders like Jefferson, Madison, and John Randolph. Support for Haiti would eventually break down along party lines, with the Adams administration negotiating normal diplomatic relations with Toussaint, and the Jefferson administration reversing such policies soon after coming to power. As historians of this episode have concluded, the need to ease the anxieties of the Southern planting class led the party of Jefferson to side with an imperial power against a newly declared independent republic, while Federalists adhered more closely to the logic of the rights of man as applied to the black race as well as the white. Throughout the period, the Connecticut Wits would be especially vocal about the antislavery lessons of the Haitian Revolution: “Remember ere too late, /The tale of St. Domingo’s fate,” Theodore Dwight would warn in 1801, “a host remain / Oppress’d with slavery’s galling chains, / And soon or late the hour will come, / Mark’d with Virginia’s dreadful doom.”37 Yet if the Connecticut poets’ early support for the Haitian Revolution evinced a willingness to accept the idea that the rights of man should be applied without regard to race, they were far less comfortable about the racial implications of the principle of equality, particularly as it pertained to the social structure of New England. At least one such poet took the opportunity to ridicule this idea of social equality as an absurd effect of certain politicians’ attraction to the ideals of the French Revolution. The satire was prompted by a report in the Independent Gazetteer that Governor John Hancock, “in conformity to the humane disposition of his heart, and the true spirit of liberty and equality, gave a BALL, in his own house, to the free Negroes of the town of Boston.” Hancock, as we have seen, had already been targeted by “The Echo” for his Anti-​­Federalist leanings and his “Puritanical” opposition to theatrical productions. A few months after this, the New Year’s poem in the Mercury fixed on Hancock’s so-​ c­ alled Equality Ball as an additional reason to ridicule him: Now, prompt to assert the rights of man, On Nature’s most extensive plan, Behold him, to his splendid Hall The noble sons of Afric call: While, as the sable bands advance, With frolic mien, and sportive dance, Refreshing clouds of rich perfume Are wafted o’er the spacious room.

The Language of Liberty   159 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . While CUFFEY near him takes his stand, Hale-​­fellow met, and grasps his hand—​­ With pleasure glistening in his eyes, “Ah! Massa Gubbernur!” he cries, “Me glad to see you, for de people say You lubb the Neegur better dan de play.”38 This passage exposes the limits of Federalist egalitarianism even at a time when Northern proto-​­Federalists were leading the cause of abolishing slavery in their own states and even beginning to speak out against slavery’s growing institutional power in the South. Far from emphasizing the common humanity of different races, as the “Echo” poets had done in the context of St. Domingue and the Miami wars, this passage relies for comic effect on an excess of racial stereotypes, from its repeated ironic references to the “rich perfume” and “fragrant air” of a ballroom occupied by African Americans to the minstrel-​­like dialect and demeanor of the stock character of “Cuffey.” Nor is this episode recounted merely to laugh at Hancock for what would have been deemed an eccentric cultural taste for African-​­influenced music. Rather, it identifies such cross-​­racial familiarity as the logical conclusion of the zeal for equality that was similarly animating the enthusiasts of the French Revolution.39 This same theme, in which the discourse of equality leads to an excess of familiarity between the races, appeared fairly regularly in the first half of the 1790s, pointing to a deep anxiety among many Federalists over how far the ascendant enthusiasm for equality might be taken. This juxtaposition typifies what Paul Finkelman has called the Federalist paradox regarding race and slavery. On one hand, Federalists continued to develop the relatively progressive stance on slavery and the rights of free blacks that would make them, by 1810, the de facto party of black voters in cities like Boston and Philadelphia. On the other, such views tended to be couched in an elitist language that allowed Federalists sufficient space to support greater rights for African Americans without the accompanying burden of “thinking of them as their equals.” As would be similarly demonstrated in the social hierarchies of the reform societies of the Second Great Awakening, New England Federalists understood social reform in largely paternalistic terms, distinct from questions of social equality among races or, for that matter, different classes of whites. By contrast, Finkelman writes, whites in Southern states developed a politics that

160   Chapter 4 depended on relegating “one group of people—​­blacks—​­to a permanent underclass status in order to uplift themselves.” By this time, Matthew Mason adds, Federalists would be portrayed by their Republican opponents as “Negro-​­lovers.” Yet amid the Revolutionary fervor of the 1790s, anxiety over the possibility of a “world turned upside down” led several Federalist poets to muse aloud about a social environment in which “the friends of men sing psalms, and prance, / And treat the Negroes to a royal dance.”40 Yet the great irony surrounding this early fixation by literary Federalists on the racial implications of the language of equality is that it was precisely through the process of playing out such possibilities in their satire that they discovered their most powerful critique of the pro-​­slavery contingent of the emerging Republican Party. The specific satiric work in which this discovery was made was John Sylvester John Gardiner’s “Remarks on the Jacobiniad,” a fragmentary mock epic lampooning the Massachusetts Constitutional Society, Boston’s version of the Democratic-​­Republican societies that had sprung up in most American cities in the early 1790s. Appearing in ten installments in the Federal Orrery, the series was modeled in part on “American Antiquities,” as it combined verse excerpts from an imaginary epic—​­“The Jacobiniad”—​­with prose passages of mock-​­scholarly commentary. In most respects, the series functioned as a standard burlesque of the Constitutional Society and its members (which, as we shall see, was a common Federalist response to the rise of the Democratic societies and their protests against the Washington administration). Recounting a visit by the goddess “FACTION” to one of the society’s meetings, “Remarks” follows the narrative structure of The Dunciad, depicting the deity as she implores her devotees to persevere in their “glorious cause” of overturning the Constitution. Yet after only a few installments of the series, the narrative abruptly shifted to a heated argument among the members of the society over whether to admit “a negro, who, on the just and noble principle of equality, demanded admission, as a member of the society.”41 The ensuing debate continued for the remaining installments of “The Jacobiniad” series, as one speaker after another addressed the moral and political implications of extending the society’s membership to African Americans. As with the earlier satire against Hancock, the intended humor of the passage originates in the assumption that the very idea of blacks and whites belonging to the same society is preposterous. Gardiner even makes a reference to Hancock’s Equality Ball, when, after “many objections” are raised against the black man’s membership, one speaker argues in favor of accepting him by remind-

The Language of Liberty   161 ing the membership of the great John Hancock’s fondness for his Negro servants. In the company of the governor, the speaker declares, “With Negroes I have shared the rich repast, / . . . ​/ With CUFFEE often have sat down to dine, / And pledged fair DINAH in a glass of wine!” Yet rather than let the debate end here, with another joke at the expense of the archetypal Democrat’s singular notion of equality, Gardiner then turns the satire in the opposite direction. For at this moment, a prominent member of the group not only argues against admitting a black man—​­“Far from our club, remove this dire disgrace, / Nor blot your meetings with the sable race!”—​­but does so by basing his argument entirely on the writings of the party’s most prominent national leader, Thomas Jefferson. Following almost verbatim from Jefferson’s now infamous passage from Notes on the State of Virginia, the speaker declares that “it was by no means, clear, that negroes were of the same species, as white men; but, on the rational and generally received doctrine of the gradation of beings, were, with great probability, supposed to rank between man and the Ouran-​­Outang.” Echoing Jefferson again, the same speaker asserts that in matters of intelligence, there is a “wide difference” between whites and blacks, which is best demonstrated by the fact that “Phillis Wheatley had been pronounced . . . ​as a mere imitator, without one spot of original genius.” Finally he declares that insofar as the “best jacobins were to be found among the inhabitants of the southern states,” where “people of color were held, not only in contempt, but in the most dreadful vassalage,” to admit such a person to their membership would be, for any Northern Democrat, a political catastrophe, “A gross affront on Madison and Giles, / Whom Faction ever favors with her smiles. / These loved confederates deem all negroes, dogs—​­/ Creatures, almost beneath the rank of hogs.”42 This is the moment at which Federalist satire on the racial implications of Democratic-​­Republican views would undergo a crucial and permanent shift, away from laughing at the social egalitarianism of Northern urban Republicans and t­oward exposing the hypocrisy of a party that, by the mid-​­1790s, was increasingly identified with Virginia planters and slave owners. The central target of all such satire, as in this passage, would be Jefferson, not least for his status as the universally acknowledged leader of the opposition party, but in particular for his lengthy record of writings and opinions on race and slavery, from the Notes on the State of Virginia to his public exchange on his racial views with the black mathematician and author Benjamin Banneker. As in “The Echo” and elsewhere, Federalist wits would find ample satiric fodder in referencing Jefferson’s own language for evidence of both extreme racial

162   Chapter 4 prejudice and hypocrisy. Thus when Lemuel Hopkins would pen his “Guillotina” verses of 1797, he would return to the issue of race, not to raise the specter of fraternization between whites and blacks, but, following Gardiner, to expose the Democratic-​­Republican candidate for president (and sitting vice president) for believing “negro slaves” to be of a race beneath the whites—​­ So far beneath, he thinks it good To exile all their brotherhood. Lest blood be stain’d in love’s embraces, And beauty fade from Southern faces: Yet traces not their lineage back, To Adam white, nor Adam black But thinks, perhaps, Eve’s handmade had ’em By some strange ouran-​­outang Adam.43 Here Hopkins amasses, in the course of a few short lines, a host of specific allusions to Query XIV of the Notes on Virginia, and hews closely—​­albeit ironically—​­to the logic of Jefferson’s argument: the vice president supports the emancipation of African slaves, but only if they are recolonized to Africa, largely because of his fear that the sexual advances of black men—​­whose “preference” for the “greater . . . ​share of beauty” in white women is proportional to the “preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species”—​­threatens the purity of the white race. As in “Remarks on the Jacobiniad,” the crucial point here is that Jefferson, and by extension the Southern-​­dominated political party he represents, denies African Americans the very claim to humanity, much less equality. Thus, playing on the same trope of Africans as a sort of missing link between human beings and animals, Hopkins writes that after Jefferson was publicly taken to task for his views on African intellectual inferiority by the African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, he was forced to tone down his “negro theory vain.” Yet, Hopkins adds witheringly, this change “work[ed] no contrition, / To ease his slaves from dread condition. / ’Twas easier far, the blacks to class, / A kind of mule, ’twixt man and ass.”44 This is Jefferson as he would be portrayed again and again in Federalist literature over the ensuing decade, as the face of a party that prated about liberty and equality and railed against aristocracy but was all the while con-

The Language of Liberty   163 trolled by actual aristocrats who lived luxuriously off the forced labor of their fellow men, women, and children. “Here we have the true character of the amiable, philanthropic, humane Mr. Jefferson,” one Philadelphia writer puts it in the months before the election of 1800: “In order to possess an extensive estate gratuitously left to him, ‘a number of slaves have been sold,’ and sent from their native place, as if they were so many head of black cattle. . . . ​After this, Mr. Jefferson could no doubt, sit down and compose the theories of manumission and amelioration.” It is this Jefferson, moreover, whose ascendancy to the presidency would be accounted for as the result not of some second “democratic revolution” but of the unjust advantage granted to the Southern states by the three-​­fifths clause of the Constitution. Finally, it is this Jefferson whose relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, which was first made public in 1802, would become the subject of countless satires directed not merely at his personal morality but also at the dysfunctional nature of the slave system and its growing power over the federal government. As indignant Federalists would often point out, with some two hundred souls in his possession Jefferson himself had more than a hundred times the representation his free-​­state counterparts had; more ghastly still, by fathering children by slaves, such men were actually rewarded for their transgressions with greater political power. In the words of one satiric poet writing during Jefferson’s presidency, “Great men can never lack supporters, / Who manufacture their own voters,” adding that if his fellow planters follow his example, “the chance is surely in his favour, / Of being President for ever.”45 Such satire, to be sure, was suffused with party politics, and this would continue to be the case with Federalist abolitionist verse in general, for the simple reason that the political interests of the Federalists—​­unmasking Southern plantation “democracy” as a fraud—​­depended also on their general censure of slavery as an institution. As party identity itself came to correspond increasingly with regional identity in the 1790s, New Englanders would take particular issue with the Republican shorthand of referring to Federalists as aristocrats. “NEW ENGLAND people turned aristocrats! say the Southern gentlemen. . . . ​ Let us examine the fact, and compare New England aristocracy with Southern democracy,” one essayist would propose. Whereas the “eastern aristocrat” labors alongside “his wife, his sons and daughters” on a farm of “50 to 200 acres,” a “democrat in the southern states,” by contrast, “owns a large number of slaves; [and] is above labor himself.” He “establishes all the ranks of the feudal system in his own family,” with himself as “king, or lord paramount,” his

164   Chapter 4 family as “nobles,” and his laboring slaves as “vassals.” Yet this same plantation owner is a “mighty democrat—​­a warm stickler for the rights of men—​­for ­liberty—​­and what is more, equality.”46 Such appeals to regional pride, especially in New England, would increase after 1800, when Federalists would come to grips with the fact that they could no longer compete as a viable party in the South. Yet paradoxically, this very recognition would transform Federalist antislavery rhetoric from a narrow partisan strategy into a full-​­fledged social movement. Relegated to the status of a regional party, and thus freed from the necessity of having to appeal to Southern voters, New England Federalism would turn ­toward the goal of shoring up its influence in the North and using that influence to check the ambitions of what would come to be called the “Slave Power.” The very absence of national influence, Mason contends, would allow the regional Federalists of the 1810s to mount their first important struggle against the expansion of slavery in the West, setting the stage for their Conscience Whig and Free Soil successors to bring abolitionism to the center of political discourse. Indeed, the argument first voiced by Federalist poets in the 1790s—​­that the slaveholding class was amassing such influence on national politics as to threaten to effectively quash any opposition—​­would be found everywhere in the abolitionist poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wells Brown, and others. As Whittier asks in near disbelief in 1835, must a union with the Southern states also mean that New Englanders will be forced to curtail their freedom of the press or abide by fugitive slave laws? To pretend that “freedom stands / On Slavery’s dark foundations strong, / On breaking hearts and fettered hands, / On robbery, and crime, and wrong?” If so, he wonders, “Is this the land our fathers loved, / The freedom which they toiled to win?”47 Such sentiments as this, which take for granted the common humanity of the white and black races, were still a considerable ideological distance from the early anti-​­Jefferson and anti-​­Southern satires of the 1790s, which first arose, as we have seen, from Federalist anxiety over the racial implications of the new egalitarian discourse that Americans were only beginning to learn to speak. Yet revealed in the twists and turns in the development of Federalist poetry on race and slavery is a shared sense of exhilaration and alarm, for Federalists and Republicans alike, over the language of liberty, equality, and the rights of man. If poets like Barlow and Freneau and their ideological allies were the first to embrace the spirit of the French Revolution and glimpse the possibility of a radical transformation of American politics, they were consid-

The Language of Liberty   165 erably less vocal than their Federalist opponents about extending such ideals to the slaves of St. Domingue or the Indians of the Old Northwest, who seemed to many Americans to be standing in the way of American progress. If Federalist poets were skeptical of the language of liberty and its particular political manifestations in France and America, they were also more likely to voice sympathy for those whose conditions gave the lie to such phrases as the rights of man. For all of their willingness to laugh at the speech and appearance and culture of Americans whom they considered to be socially inferior, Federalist poets set in motion the practice of using poetry and song as a form of moral protest against unjust policies that seemed impervious to change through the avenue of electoral politics. And despite Republicans’ enthusiasm over the idea that they were living at a uniquely redemptive moment in history, in which liberty and equality finally were being granted to all, they would live to see this vision compromised in large part by their electoral successes. For by the time it became clear that the future of their party depended chiefly on a Southern base of support, Republican voices would be silent on the subject of race and slavery. Yet the poets who aligned themselves with the party of Jefferson—​­Freneau and Barlow, but also Tucker and countless anonymous allies—​­would never waver from their enthusiasm for the cause of the common man against various perceived threats against his rights and liberties. Among these threats, as we shall see in Chapter 5, would be the federal government itself, which many Republicans would view as more activist and overbearing than they had ever imagined in the preconstitutional moment. In the political writings of the newly elected vice president they would detect a longing to restore the power and pomp of monarchy and aristocracy; in the complex financial schemes put forth by the secretary of the Treasury, they would perceive a hidden agenda to enrich a new generation of speculators at the expense of Revolutionary soldiers and their families; in the negotiation of Jay’s treaty with the British, they would see a desire to restore political ties with their old enemies and alienate their natural ally, republican France. In response to these threats, and drawing for their inspiration on the language of liberty, equality, and the rights of man, they would wage the first targeted satirical campaign against a presidential administration—​­all on behalf of the people, whose voice and interests, they would insist, were being betrayed by their own government.

Chapter 5

h The Voice of the People T

he first poem to accuse a member of the new federal administration of conspiring against the public interest appeared in 1789, scarcely after the first session of the first Congress was convened and even before all the states had ratified the Constitution. Written and published anonymously by Edward Church (brother of Benjamin, the author of the Stamp Act–era satire, The Times), the poem took aim at Vice President John Adams, as was obliquely hinted at in its title, The Dangerous Vice ‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑, A Fragment. Perhaps reflecting Church’s hesitancy about openly attacking a member of the new government, the poem keeps its satire of Adams veiled, such that the precise meaning of the phrase “dangerous vice” is left unspecified throughout. Those who noticed that the number of hyphens following the word “vice” corresponded exactly with the number of letters in the word “president,” however, would have readily understood its hidden charge, that Adams posed a danger to the new republic. Nevertheless, Church made sure to imply that the title could also be taken to mean merely the “dangerous vice” of pride or ambition, thus locating the poem in the tradition, going back to Pope’s Moral Essays and Young’s Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, of composing poetic satire about a universal moral topic. Church sustains this deliberate ambiguity of satiric intent through the first section of poem, which refrains from referring to Adams or any other individual but simply describes the common human tendency to be dissatisfied with one’s lot. Addressing this theme through a variety of exempla—​­wealthy men who live in “pamper’d luxury” yet “yawn for thousands more,” gentlemen who “APE . . . ​the fashions” and “etiquette” of the “foreign Great”—​­Church con-

The Voice of the People   167 cludes with a conventional warning to his countrymen to “Be grateful, then . . . ​ / Nor stretch your claims to such prepost’rous size, / Lest your too partial ­country—​­wiser grown—​­shou’d on your native dunghills set you down.” Yet about halfway into the poem, he further refines this point to describe those who would desire to import to America the systems of social distinction that characterized aristocratic Europe, thus making it clearer that he has in mind a recent debate on the Senate floor over the question of how the officers of the new government should be addressed. This is the point at which it becomes obvious that the would-​­be aristocrat who secretly dreams of restoring his country to a pre-​­Revolutionary state is none other than the sitting vice president: YE wou’d BE TITLED! whom, in evil hour—​­

The rash, unthinking people cloth’d with pow’r, Who drunk with pride, of foreign bawbles [sic] dream, And rave of a COLUMBIAN DIADEM—​­ Be prudent, modest, mod’rate, grateful, wise, Nor on your country’s ruin strive to rise.1 In the immediate background of this passage stands the well-​­known episode in which a series of linguistic missteps caused Adams to become the symbol of a perceived threat to undo the political effects of the Revolution and restore monarchy and aristocracy to America. Historians have long noted that Adams was somewhat of an unlikely target of such a charge, as he was known to live frugally and free of social affectation, and unlike most members of the founding generation, he had never owned a slave. Yet in his political writings from the 1780s, Adams had compared the office of the president to that of a king, and tended to use such terms as “natural aristocracy,” which seemed to stretch the limits of what could legitimately be said by a “true” republican. More damaging still, in one of the first debates of the new Congress, Adams had engaged in a prolonged and heated argument about the propriety of titles of honor for the president and other distinguished officials. Though he insisted he had been misunderstood—​­that he never favored monarchy as such, and that he had meant an “aristocracy of talent” rather than birth—​ ­Adams was branded by his opponents as a “monocrat,” an aristocrat, a lover of titles, and an enemy of republicanism, thus leading to the equally dubious honor of being the first federal office holder to be attacked in verse.2 Foregrounding the same importance of the language of politics we found

168   Chapter 5 in Chapter 4, the antimonarchist critique of Adams focused on what his words implied about his political philosophy, particularly in the context of a number of fundamental questions that arose during the constitutional debates. The first, grounded in the earlier warnings of Anti-​­Federalists, centered on the distinct authority vested in the different branches of government: for many who had fought the American Revolution in the name of “Congress”—​ ­a word, as we have seen, that was synonymous with American governance for Patriots and Loyalists alike—​­the very idea of a presidency was jarring. As Church goes on to argue in The Dangerous Vice ‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑, being governed by what some referred to as an “elected king” might not pose an immediate problem so long as the wise and virtuous Washington held that office. But such a “king,” he adds, may be succeeded by another (such as Adams) who proves “a Stickler for a crown / Tainted with foreign vices, and his own, / Already plotting dark, insidious schemes, / Already dubb’d a King, in royal dreams.” The crystallized in central resounding plea at the conclusion of the poem—​­ Church’s appeal to “Resist the VICE—​­and that contagious pride / To that o’erweening VICE—​­so near ally’d”—​­is that Americans should speak out now about the possibility of a leader’s usurping the people’s sovereignty, because if they don’t, they might just awaken to a world in which it is considered a crime to speak out at all: “SPEAK boldly then—​­ye wise!—​­and ACT in season. / What but to THINK, tomorrow may be treason.”3 Notwithstanding Church’s conspiratorial tone, The Dangerous Vice ‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑ raised a number of fundamental questions about the relationship between the people and the officials charged with representing their interests. As Eric Slauter has recently shown, such questions involved not simply how, precisely, the new government would be organized but also, more broadly, the nature and definition of political representation itself. Should representation, as Adams had argued, be understood as analogous to the way a portrait in miniature represents a person? In this model, the relationship between the people and their representatives was grounded in the idea of likeness, a metaphor that granted the representative considerable scope in devising policy independent of the people’s directives. Or alternatively, should representation be understood as more akin to transcription, in which the representative was more limited to reproducing the voice and will of the people? For many in the burgeoning opposition, the policies pursued by the administration appeared to have very quickly strayed from the public interest, and thus called for certain extragovernmental strategies for communicating the vox populi to the

The Voice of the People   169 government. The most obvious of these is the formation of Democratic-​ ­Republican societies in 1793–1794, which asserted a more direct role in directing public policy. Yet befitting the extent to which such debates, as Slauter emphasizes, reflected the “cultural origins” of the constitutional system, other strategies involved cultural responses, such as poems claiming to speak back to those in power in the voice of the people.4 This chapter examines the literary warfare between rival groups of poets, each claiming to speak on behalf of the people in the context of countless policy questions that arose in the first years of the federal government. Amid controversies over how to fund the national debt, how to interpret the Constitution with regard to executive power, and whether to negotiate a new treaty with Great Britain, poets responded in strings of topical poems in newspapers that were themselves increasingly aligned with one of the two emerging parties. Running through virtually all of the policy poems of the first half of the 1790s was a shared sense that matters of policy boiled down to questions about who, precisely, constituted “the people” and who legitimately spoke for them in the new republic. To a rising number of Republican poets, the administration was populated by a political and economic elite that bore no resemblance to the people whom they ostensibly served; such a situation called for a poetry that exposed the aristocrats and speculators in power and voiced the concerns of Revolutionary soldiers, impoverished victims of unjust financial schemes, and Democratic-​­Republican society members who demanded to be heard. To the literary supporters of the administration, on the other hand, it was precisely the voice of the people that had entrusted the president to appoint men like Alexander Hamilton to set policy. To breach that trust, they maintained—​­ particularly by insinuating that such men were conspiring against the principles of the Revolution—​­was tantamount to undermining the legitimacy of the still-​­precarious constitutional government. This, in turn, called for a poetry that exposed the so-​­called populists of the Democratic-​ ­Republican movement as exemplars of a new breed of politician who sought to gain and hold power by cultivating popularity.

Soldiers and Speculators Notwithstanding Edward Church’s attack against Adams, most poems on affairs of state from 1789 and 1790 tended t­ oward celebrating national unity under the new federal Constitution. Hymns such as Federal Song. For the

170   Chapter 5 Anniversary of American Independence and “Ode Sung on the Arrival of the President of the United States” communicated the patriotic spirit as manifested in the “Grand Federal Processions” celebrating the ratification of the Constitution or the ceremonial stops on Washington’s presidential grand tour. One example of such celebratory verse is “Stanzas on the arrival of Congress in Philadelphia, December 1790,” commemorating the federal government’s move to its new residence. In addition to welcoming the president and the Congress to the new capital, the poem contrasts the present moment, symbolized by peace and concord, with a past defined by enmity and struggle. Avoiding all mention of the recent conflict between Federalists and Anti-​­Federalists, the poem invokes the “warriors” and “patriots” of the Revolution who “nobly struggled for . . . ​your rights, and ours” and contrasts that struggle with the new era of cooperation among the members of Congress and the administration. In doing so, ironically, the poet unwittingly singles out four figures who, within a year of the poem’s publication, would be the leading combatants in the partisan warfare that would dominate the 1790s: “Be ADAMS to your nation still endear’d! / And be the powers of JEFFERSON rever’d! / Be MADISON for eloquence renown’d! / Still various worth in HAMILTON be found! / Truth soon must flourish; enmity decrease—​­/ They come, the patrons of true worth and peace!”5 Nothing like this prediction, of course, would come to pass; in fact, three of the four founders mentioned in the passage were already engaged in the first proto-​­partisan conflict of the Federalist era, involving Hamilton’s ambitious plan for funding the national debt, promoting manufactures, and establishing the first Bank of the United States. For most of 1790, Hamilton and Madison—​­whose earlier cooperation would be memorialized by their sharing a pseudonym in the Federalist, “Publius”—​­were engaged in a bitter legislative fight, with Madison leading the opposition to the funding scheme outlined in Hamilton’s first Report on Public Credit. The main point of contention was Hamilton’s insistence that the government pay off its war debt in full and without “discrimination,” that is, without distinguishing between the soldiers who were originally paid for their service in the form of settlement certificates and the creditors who had later acquired those certificates, often at a fraction of their value, during the hard money crises of the 1780s. At issue for the Treasury was the unassailability of the public credit system as a whole, in which the United States would be deemed a reliable risk and certificates of debt could be exchanged as money according to their value in the market-

The Voice of the People   171 place. Absent from this pragmatic assessment, however, was the prevailing sense of injustice felt by many war veterans and their families over a system that, in light of the dire state of the postwar economy, seemed to place the interests of creditors and speculators before those of the soldiers themselves, many of whom had been forced by poverty to part with their securities. Out of this moral objection came the first sustained satiric campaign of the period, directed against Hamilton and his financial scheme.6 Reflecting a general hesitancy among poets to engage directly with the new heads of government, the literary campaign against the Treasury began somewhat obliquely, with a short poem by Philip Freneau called “The American Soldier.” Composed after the passage of the funding bill, the poem anticipated Freneau’s later role as the administration’s chief literary antagonist. Yet rather than address the funding controversy directly, “The American Soldier” presents itself in its subtitle simply as “A Picture from the Life” of a typical Revolutionary War veteran. In contrast to the unrestrained zeal of so much of Freneau’s political verse, this poem relies on iconic imagery and solemnity of tone to create a poignant scene of social injustice: DEEP in a vale, a stranger now to arms,

Too poor to shine in courts, too proud to beg, He, who once warr’d on SARATOGA’s plains Sits musing o’er his scars, and wooden leg. Remembering still the toils of former days To other hands he sees his earnings paid; They share the due reward—​­he feeds on praise, Lost in the abyss of want, misfortune’s shade. Here and throughout, the poem derives emotional power from what it chooses not to say: there are no references to Congress or the Treasury or the debate over discrimination, nor to the poem’s obvious villains, the speculators into whose “hands” the soldier’s earnings have been paid. Rather, the poem turns simply on the dramatic contrast between the unnamed “he” who has sacrificed his very leg at Saratoga and the equally indistinguishable “they” who spend their time dining in “domes where splendid tapers glare” or attending “the great man’s levee.” Nor does it advocate for direct government compensation for those veterans most in need, insisting instead that the American

172   Chapter 5 solider is “too proud to beg,” and that the cause of Freedom is his only reward. Yet with a level of moral indignation that anticipates the long tradition of social protest in American literature and song, the poem concludes with the bitter observation that after having helped repel the British and raised “FREEDOM’s fabric” in North America, this soldier is left with nothing but “FAMINE, and a name!”7 “The American Soldier” set the symbolic terms for the debate over Hamilton’s entire financial program, which intensified in the ensuing months, first amid the contentious fight over establishing the National Bank and then amid the tumult of speculation in Bank scrip that followed. No subject captured the imagination of newspaper poets in the summer of 1791 like speculation. In its initial phase, the passage of the Bank bill and the announcement of a public offering of Bank shares inspired patriotic tributes to America’s symbolic coming of age, including one poem that highlighted the symbolism of the date on which the shares were offered—​­July 4, “the Fifteenth Anniversary of AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE.” Yet after shares sold out in the first hour of ­ istory—​ going on sale, setting the stage for the first speculative bubble in U.S. h ­when the market value of $25 shares rose to nearly $300 before crashing a month later—​­these sanguine responses were replaced by a flurry of poems denouncing the evils of speculation. In most cases, as in “The Bank Script Bubble, an Alter’d Song,” they depicted speculation as a dangerous game in which greed overcomes reason, leading the gullible to temporarily experience the pleasures of great wealth before leaving them destitute or worse: “But should our Bank Scrip Babel fall, / What numbers will be frowning, / The Capers then must ease their gall, / By hanging—​­or by drowning.” Other poems offered a window into the tortured mind of the speculator, revealing the most corruptive effects of speculation. “The Speculator’s Soliloquy,” an extended allusion to Hamlet—​­“TO sell, or not to sell—​­that is the question”—​ p ­ ortrays the holder of government securities as virtually paralyzed by “suspense, and fear.” The speculator is tormented by the prospect of losing his fortune but also plagued with more insidious trepidation over selling before he can maximize his gains, forcing him to live in perpetual resentment ­toward those who realize greater profits: “Thus money makes us slaves or madmen all, / When we experience it with such greediness, / And center all our hopes in the acquirement.”8 Such poems as these belong to a long tradition of anti-​­speculation poetry and song going back at least to the South Sea Bubble of 1719 and its after-

The Voice of the People   173 math, which inspired Pope, Swift, and other poets from the English Augustan period to relentlessly assail the influence of “stock-​­jobbers” and the system of “paper-​­credit” as root causes of a more general moral and political corruption. Viewed against this backdrop, the emergence of new capital markets and stock exchanges alongside the formation of the federal government struck many early critics of the administration as a sign that this same atmosphere of corruption had taken hold in America. The poem that pursued this connection most explicitly was a long, anonymous satire from 1791 entitled The Glass; or Speculation: A Poem. Containing an Account of the Ancient, and Genius of the Modern, Speculators. As the subtitle suggests, the poem reads the current speculative frenzy as the latest episode in a grand moral struggle whose roots lie in the greed of Cain, Caesar, and Alexander the Great, who are all described as speculators of the ancient world. Turning to the modern period, the poet warns that all of the advancements promised by the new American ­nation—​­in the arts, in science, and in learning—​­are in danger of being obliterated by the “baleful pest” and “dire contagion” of speculation, “That monster that would ev’ry thing devour, / But finds his proper food among the poor.” As such lines emphasize, speculation is a function of class struggle, pitting common people—​­symbolized, once again, by the soldiers and their families who were forced to cash in their stocks for “scarce an eighth of their real value”—​­against a small cadre of money men who “learn the intelligence that’s whisper’d round / The rise or fall of six-​­pence in the pound,” and exploit it for their own ends. Yet the special significance of The Glass within the larger body of antispeculation verse arises from its taking this critique a crucial step further, drawing a direct parallel between the economic opposition between rich and poor and the political opposition between republicanism and aristocracy. As the author puts it in the poem’s preface, it is not simply that speculation “corrupt[s] the heart” in a moral sense but also that it, “in a political sense, sap[s] the foundation of republicanism, and pave[s] the way for aristocracy and despotism.”9 Nor does The Glass present this political conflict in the abstract categories of aristocracy and republicanism alone; it does so too, as is made clear by the end of the poem, in the terms of a full-​­fledged party struggle. Connecting the speculative frenzy of 1791 to the earlier fight over the funding bill, the poet depicts Madison as the hero of a nascent reform movement, valiantly struggling against a wave of corruption: “Oh! what a time, important for you all, / When rose to view the mighty funding bill; / When Madison his noble

174   Chapter 5 motion made.” The Congressmen who voted against Madison’s amendment appear as a sickly collection of devils loyal only to themselves and the cause of malevolence itself: “Chear up my lads, dispel your grief and woe, / Your father is most powerful below, / He, if the sacred book we may believe, / At pleasure has the wealth of earth to give; / And here, to say, (I need not make such bones,) / By your rewards you seem his fav’rite sons.”10 Such is the logic whereby Hamilton and his allies in Congress, having put in place a system deemed to be a boon to speculators and a scourge to the common people, take their place not merely among the would-​­be aristocrats infiltrating the new government but, more sinister still, as the latest embodiment of a demonic conspiracy against the public interest. The symbolic link between Hamilton and speculation was further reinforced the following year, after a second speculative bubble—​­spurred on by one of Hamilton’s old friends and associates, William Duer—​­led to the so-​ c­ alled Panic of 1792. A schoolmate of Hamilton’s who had worked for a time at the Treasury Department, Duer had amassed a substantial fortune speculating in government debt when he and a partner devised a grand plan to corner the market in both government stock and bank scrip. Borrowing widely to finance the scheme, Duer succeeded in driving up values for a time, but in early 1792 the bubble burst again, bringing about his financial ruin and that of countless others as the effects of his dealings reverberated through the economy. Before long, Duer would end his life in debtor’s prison, and his name would live on as an emblem of the corruption endemic to the new money economy. Importantly, the symbolic branding of Duer as America’s arch-​ ­speculator was owed in no small part to a poem, also by Freneau, simply titled “The Speculator.” In many ways a companion poem to “The American Soldier,” “The Speculator” recounts his rise and fall without ever identifying Duer by name, presenting him as the iconic figure of a satiric progress piece. Indeed, progress and movement are the poem’s principal motifs, beginning with the Speculator’s hunt “from town to town,” like “a sea-​­hawk watching for his prey,” in search of all available government stock: “With soothing words the widow’s mite he gain’d, / With piercing glance watch’d misery’s dark abode, / Filch’d paper scraps while yet a scrap remain’d, / Bought where he must, and cheated where he cou’d.” This, in turn, leads to another kind of progress, to the heights of wealth and through the streets in a luxurious coach: “One Sunday morn, to church I saw him ride / In glittering state. . . . ​/ The following week, with Madam at his side, / To routs they drove—​­and drank

The Voice of the People   175 Imperial tea.” Yet when the “the mighty bubble” bursts, the Speculator takes his final ignominious journey to prison: “And he, who countless millions own’d so late / Stopt short—​­and clos’d his triumphs in a JAIL.”11 With its conventional narrative and simple, cautionary moral, “The Speculator” offered little that had not already been said about the dangers of speculation. Yet Freneau’s poem packed a unique political punch nevertheless, simply by underscoring the convergence of fact and moral allegory in the life of William Duer. To be sure, the speculator of the poem is an emblem of greed and heartlessness, and his story communicates familiar verities about such men and the punishment they rightly deserve. Yet as anyone reading the poem in the summer of 1792 was aware, this speculator was not merely an archetype but an actual person, who cheated countless other actual people out of their fortunes. Worse still, as Freneau hardly needed to point out, this speculator was also someone whom Hamilton, arguably the most powerful figure in Washington’s administration, had once considered a close friend and associate.12 Despite claims by supporters that his actions stabilized the financial system in the wake of the crisis, Hamilton would scarcely live down the symbolic connection between his policies, his associations, and the shady world of speculators that seemed for a time to dominate the American economy. In political terms, this gave rise to a series of Congressional investigations of the Treasury led by Senator William Branch Giles, and the subsequent resolutions of censure (drafted by Jefferson) brought against the beleaguered secretary in early 1793. Such inquests, in turn, contributed to a sense of perpetual suspicion among Hamilton’s political opponents, who insinuated that speculators lurked everywhere in the new government and would remain so until exposed to the light of day. Thus, for instance, in January 1793—​­the same month the investigation of the Treasury was initiated—​­the National Gazette printed a letter in support of an effort begun by a Revolutionary War veteran named James Blanchard to secure a new financial settlement for soldiers who had sold their certificates prior to the passage of the funding law. A former quartermaster from the Third New Hampshire regiment, Blanchard had recently charged (also in the Gazette) that several members of Congress had personally profited from speculation in the very securities they had voted to fund. In response, the letter—​­signed “A Fellow Laborer”—​­commends Blanchard for “stepping forth” on behalf of his fellow veterans and urges him to continue to expose the secret speculators who have infiltrated the government at every level:

176   Chapter 5 Be not deterred by the open threats or secret frowns of men in office—​­we have long been amused with hints and insinuations respecting the dark intrigues of Congress-​­men—​­It was reserved for you Sir, to point out the culprits. Neither names nor stations should screen public plunderers from public execrations; go on, Sir, in the noble work you have begun—​­state facts, produce your vouchers, name your men, lay open the whole scene of iniquity, and let vengeance fall on the guilty—​­strip off the mask that conceals the speculator under the guise of the patriot—​­drag forth to daylight the men let them be who they will; whether they be Presidents, Vice-​­Presidents, Judges, Senators, Representatives, Secretaries, Comptrollers, Auditors, Commissioners, Registers, Clerks, Collectors, Supervisors, Inspectors, Agents, Contractors, Quartermasters, Generals, Colonels, Governors, State Comptrollers, Treasurers, Accountants, or whatever else may be named. Let the Augean stable be cleansed, tho’ the world be turned inside out or topsy-​­turvy—​­order will spring out of confusion, light will flash out of chaos.13

As suggested by the metaphor of the “Augean stable,” as well as the exhaustive list of officials deserving to be dragged into the light, this is an image of an administration so mired in corruption that only a government-​­wide investigation can uncover it. Such rhetoric animated both the specific call for investigations into Hamilton’s dealings and the broader appeals to organize what Jefferson referred to as the “republican interest” into a full-​­fledged opposition party. Yet insofar as the letter represents a government actively conspiring to conceal its corrupt dealings—​­concluding with a warning against the possibility of reprisals by “Apollyon” (Hamilton) and his “host of treasury suckers”—​­ the same rhetoric provided the inspiration for pro-​ blood-​­ ­government poets to mount a satiric counteroffensive against Hamilton’s critics. Thus it is that the “Fellow Laborer” letter would be parodied in verse not once but twice, in early 1793, most notably in “The Echo, No. XI.” As seen in the previous chapter, the “Echo” poets discovered their satiric niche in versifying the rhetorical extravagance of various paeans to the French Revolution. The same satiric strategy is evident in their parody of the “Fellow Laborer” letter, which calls constant attention to the language and tone of its exposé of speculators and corrupt officials to recast the Fellow Laborer as a

The Voice of the People   177 political paranoid who sees speculators lurking in every corner. So zealous is this figure to unmask the secret enemies of the republic, “The Echo” suggests, that he considers neither the accuracy of the accusations nor, more menacingly, what might happen to those who are publicly branded as villains: Pray sir go on—​­complete the work begun, State facts, produce your vouchers one by one; On whom soe’er your wise suspicions light, Call forth the villains, be they wrong or right—​­ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Load the old Cart with every crippled dog, Each speculating, money-​­asking rogue; No matter who, nor what—​­if once they’re taken We’ll smoke the rascals into human bacon.14 Beyond depicting the Fellow Laborer as consumed by rage, the parody takes particular aim at the original letter’s catalogue of government posts that may have been infiltrated by speculators, ridiculing (in a nod to similar lists in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) the writer’s compulsion to name every title he can think of as in need of investigation: “Senators, Collectors, / Comptrollers, State-​­Comptrollers, Office-​­writers, / Drummers and Fifers, Minters and Auditors, / Accountants, Representatives, and Runners, / Clerks, Colonels, Treasurers, Quarter-​­masters, Gunners, / Post-​­masters, Secretaries, Supervisors, / Door-​­keepers, Chaplains, Crooked-​­Scheme Devisors‑‑‑.” The serious point embedded in such raillery is that this would-​­be reformer seems wholly untroubled by the implications of calling the legitimacy of the new government into question. In light of the federal administration’s still-​­uncertain status in 1793, as well as the reports appearing at the same moment of the French Revolution’s turn ­toward violence and disorder, the most alarming aspect of this antispeculation scourge is the willingness, as the actual Fellow Laborer puts it, to turn the world “topsy-​­turvy” in the hope that “order will spring out of confusion.” In response, the “Echo” poet reproduces precisely this reasoning: “Tho dire misrule should riot o’er the world, / And Nature’s systems be in ruin hurl’d,” the parodied Laborer muses, there is no cause for worry, because “From black Confusion’s womb shall order rise, / And blinking chaos ope in light his eyes.”15 Thus does “The Echo” render the opposition as both animated by conspiracy theories concerning the leaders of the administration

178   Chapter 5 and drawn to the same rhetoric of “cleansing” chaos that was elsewhere being invoked to justify revolutionary violence and terror. Importantly for our understanding of the Federalist literary response to the antispeculation campaign, “The Echo” was not the only verse parody to appear in a Hartford newspaper attacking critics of the funding bill, the Fellow Laborer in particular. A few weeks before “The Echo, No. XI,” appeared in the American Mercury, the Connecticut Courant began its own series, aptly entitled “The Versifier.” (Though authorship of the short-​­lived series has not been definitively identified, it has been attributed to Mason Fitch Cogswell, a Hartford physician who belonged to the same social circle as the members of the “Echo” group.) Undoubtedly inspired by the popularity of “The Echo,” the author of “The Versifier” similarly explains the purpose of his series as highlighting through versification the already affected or “poetic” aspects of examples of political rhetoric, quipping that “tho’ much of our verse is void of poetry, yet some of our prose is replete with it.”16 Like the parody of the “Fellow Laborer” letter in “The Echo,” moreover, the first installment of “The Versifier” focuses on the language of the original document to lampoon the writer’s eagerness to delegitimize any government institution believed to harbor speculators or other corrupt agents. Yet “The Versifier” strays from the formula of “The Echo” in one important respect: whereas the latter minimizes its criticism of Blanchard himself, “The Versifier” holds Blanchard and other soldiers primarily responsible for selling their settlement certificates for less than full value: “You’ve nobly and intrepidly stept forth, / To shew your own, and eke your comrade’s worth, / By calling on your country for that pay, / Which long ago you spent as well as they.” Exhibiting none of the sympathy for impoverished soldiers and their widows that other Federalist defenders of the funding bill made sure to display, “The Versifier” blames drunkenness and other personal vices—​­as opposed to the economic collapse of the 1780s—​­for the decision by many soldiers to sell their stocks at a discount: “Nor heeds if soldiers choose to send their pay, / In grog draughts down their throats from day to day, / Shall crouch, and shall refund their ill-​ ­got pelf, / As you well know by what you feel yourself.” Even the passage ridiculing the Fellow Laborer’s zeal for rooting out government corruption identifies class resentment as the true motive animating the critics of the government: “Generals, Colonels, Governors of State, / Accountants, ­Treasurers—​ ­for all these we hate, / And whoe’er else presumes o’er us to soar, / Renown’d for wealth, for virtue or for power.”17

The Voice of the People   179 Here, in the contrast between what might otherwise seem to be nearly identical Federalist satires, directed at the same political and discursive target, stands a crucial divergence between two distinct aspects of Federalist verse as they would develop amid countless subsequent party struggles during the 1790s. The response of “The Versifier”—​­projecting a frank moral condemnation on those who failed to take advantage of the funding system as it was devised, and who now complained out of envy ­toward those more “virtuous” than themselves—​­reinforced an image of Federalists in general as unsympathetic patricians who blamed the poor and powerless for their own misfortune. The response of “The Echo,” on the other hand, projected the preferred self-​­image of most Federalist wits as rational, educated, urbane republicans who looked on with trepidation at a populist movement all too willing to embrace conspiratorial rhetoric and call into question the government’s very legitimacy. That the “Echo” poets chose to respond to the very same letter as “The Versifier” only weeks after the latter’s response is itself significant because it suggests that this installment of “The Echo” was intended as a literary corrective to an impolitic response by a fellow Federalist poet. At any rate, the contrasting tones of the two parodies would anticipate the divergent directions Federalist poets would take with regard to their characterizations of “the people.” For the remainder of Washington’s term, as we shall see, most Federalist poets would follow the satiric strategy of “The Echo,” responding to their opponents’ preoccupation over aristocrats and money men with amused detachment and accentuating the differences between the nascent parties in intellectual and aesthetic, as well as political, terms. Such a tack reflected the confidence of most Federalist wits in the 1790s that they stood on the side of reason against a form of political extremism that would ultimately be exposed as such. It was also politically expedient in the sense that it appealed to anyone who looked askance at what might have seemed an increasingly paranoid view of Washington’s administration. To follow the strategy of “The Versifier,” on the other hand—​­as a number of poets would later do, particularly during John Adams’s presidency—​­may well have gratified Federalists’ animus, but it also carried considerable political risk. For even if many Federalists believed that their antagonists were motivated by resentment ­toward their social or intellectual betters, to express such a view openly rendered them vulnerable to a powerful counterattack by the rising coterie of Republican wits who were seeking to establish themselves as the true literary voice of the people.

180   Chapter 5 Peter Pindar in America Philip Freneau owed his position as the leader of the proto-​­Republicans’ literary campaign against the administration first and foremost to his skill and output as a poet. But his importance arose also from his role as the founder and editor of one of the first opposition newspapers of the Federalist era, the National Gazette. During the course of the paper’s two-​­year run, Freneau competed directly with John Fenno’s pro-​­administration Gazette of the United States, initiating what Jeffrey Pasley and others have called the “Philadelphia newspaper war,” itself a crucial episode in the development of the two distinct political parties.18 This war is usually said to have begun in the fall of 1791, when Freneau accepted Jefferson’s invitation to come to Philadelphia and edit the paper while serving nominally as a translator in the State Department. Yet in an important sense it began months earlier, when Freneau was still living in New York, for it was then that he contributed the poem “Pomposo and His Printer” to the Daily Advertiser. In it Freneau accuses his future rival, Fenno, of acting as a paid propagandist for the administration as a whole, and particularly for Vice-​­President John Adams. In the poem, a haughty Adams (whom Freneau styles “Pomposo” in this and in subsequent poems) is interrupted in his “country-​­house” by the lowly Fenno, “One of your snug, complying men, / Titles to whom, and wealth, are everything.” At first, the vice president treats the stranger with “insolent disdain,” but when Fenno plies him with flattery over his recent book, Defense of the Constitutions, Adams reverses himself and he asks if the man has a printing press. “I have not now,” Fenno replies, “But if you promise work, I can, with ease, / Provide a press, and play what tune you please.” The poem concludes with Adams giving Fenno his Discourses on Davila to reprint (which the actual Fenno had published in serial form in the Gazette)—​­thus recasting Fenno’s acknowledged pro-​­administration stance as the result of an unseemly conspiracy between the press and the government.19 Beyond providing a window into Freneau’s own decision to enter into a similar relationship with Jefferson (for which he would be publicly criticized by Hamilton in the Gazette of the United States), this early attack underscores the interrelationship between newspaper wars and poetry wars. In “Pomposo,” Freneau recognized the value of using poetry to undermine a rival newspaper’s claim to reliability, portraying the editor as dependent on a patron or party. In his editorship of the National Gazette, Freneau discovered the political poten-

The Voice of the People   181 tial of using a newspaper to disseminate multiple poems with a consistent political message, turning the Gazette into a kind of literary clearinghouse for other Republican papers.20 Not surprisingly, this involved printing his own literary-​­political compositions, including poems we have already encountered, such as “The Speculator” and “God Save the Rights of Man.” But it also involved seeking out and publishing original poems by other like-​­minded poets, from fugitive pieces by anonymous contributors to what would become the first and most important series of satiric verses by a Republican poet: St. George Tucker’s “Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar,” which appeared in the Gazette throughout the summer of 1793. A professor of law at William and Mary and part of a circle of belletrists in Williamsburg, Tucker had occasionally ventured into the literary public sphere, as in his 1788 work Liberty: A poem; on the independence of America. Yet it was by adopting the persona of “Jonathan Pindar” that Tucker emerged as the most important participant from the Southern states in the poetry wars of the 1790s. In the “Probationary Odes,” Tucker mounted a more extensive satiric campaign than had previously been waged by an opposition poet, and he brought together several disparate attacks against the various “villains” of the administration into a collection of interconnected satires grounded in a coherent political philosophy. That this philosophy—​­which combined the constitutional theories of Virginia “Old Republicanism” with the burgeoning populism of the Democratic-​­Republican societies—​­would ultimately come to define Jeffersonian Republicanism as a whole is a testament to the political importance of the “Probationary Odes.” Yet equally important was Tucker’s decision to articulate this philosophy through a brilliant use of literary imitation (one that would spark its own literary vogue), which he announces in the title and headnote to the series’ inaugural piece: “Probationary Odes: By Jonathan Pindar, Esq. a cousin of Peter’s, and candidate for the post of Poet-​­Laureat.”21 Embedded in this title are two different allusions to contemporary works of British satire: the first is to the 1785 series Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, by the group of London poets who had also produced the Rolliad, a series of satires against William Pitt’s government, which had also influenced the composition of “The Anarchiad.” The second and more obvious allusion is to John Wolcot’s “Peter Pindar,” whose satiric odes poking fun at figures from Pitt to James Boswell to King George had made the pseudonymous figure a genuine literary sensation, both in Britain and America, during the 1780s and early 1790s. (The transatlantic popularity of Peter Pindar’s satiric odes, which

182   Chapter 5 likely inspired Tucker to recreate Wolcot’s character for an American context, may be gauged by the many American editions of Peter Pindar’s works, which appeared nearly every year from 1786 to 1794.) Presenting himself as Peter’s American cousin, Jonathan Pindar emulates all of the comic traits that defined Wolcot’s character, particularly the ironic obsequiousness with which Peter treated the real-​­life cultural and political figures he addressed. This trait is obvious in Jonathan’s opening ode, “To all the great folks in a lump”—​ r­ eferring to the Congress and the secretaries of executive departments—​­when he petitions such powerful figures to be considered for the nonexistent post of poet laureate: SO please your Worships, Honors, LORDSHIPS, GRACES!

I JONATHAN to PETER PINDAR cousin, Hearing that you possess a mint of places Have come to ask for less than half a dozen. I ask not that to serve me you should quit Your lofty stations, or turn out your friends; No—​­I’ve more conscience! and at once admit Your duty’s to consult on means and ends. Those ends once answer’d—​­and the means obtain’d, To JONATHAN’s petition lend an ear.22 The epistolary situation running through this and all of the series’ subsequent odes, in which the lowly Jonathan petitions various “great folks” in the hope of attaining a government post, provided an ideal backdrop for satirizing the new government. For the key to Jonathan’s character is his open acknowledgment of his mercenary motives, whereby he declares that he is more than willing to compose empty panegyrics for powerful men in return for one of the “mint of places” now available in the government. In making such claims, Tucker tapped into the charm of Wolcot’s original persona, which arose from the same cheerful admission of his status as a literary hireling. As Peter explains in one poem, “I keep a rhyme-​­shop—​­mine’s a trade: / I sell to old and young, to man and maid; / . . . ​and no man / Wishes more universally to please.” Such confessions, of course, had the effect of transforming Peter’s lavish encomiums into inverted satires, creating a paradoxical equality between

The Voice of the People   183 Peter, the lowly, unscrupulous rhymester, and the powerful figures he presumed to address. This is the dynamic exploited everywhere in Tucker’s “Probationary Odes,” such as when, in the same inaugural poem, as Jonathan is acknowledging his own desire for money and influence, he projects the same motives onto the actual office holders of the new government: I ask not dollars; though in truth a few Would jingle sweetly in a poet’s purse: And since t’encourage arts belongs to you, A pension would not make the thing the worse. I ask not such a patronage as brings To brother heads an influence far and wide; Commissions, loans, douceurs, jobbs, pretty things, Bank-​­votes, directorships, and offices beside.23 In one sense, this is a version of the familiar image we have already seen in discourse critical of the administration, of a government that has been corrupted by a legion of petty placemen who have sold their country for a bribe or office. Yet Tucker’s decision to voice this critique in the form of an extended allusion to Peter Pindar served to infuse the “Probationary Odes” with the additional reminder that such corruption was part of a long history of political corruption going back at least to the time of the English Augustan poets. For as William Dowling points out, Wolcot’s own character of Peter Pindar was himself an allusion to the Grub Street hacks or hireling poets that Pope had satirized in The Dunciad and elsewhere. Peter Pindar’s emergence in the Britain of Pitt and George III thus served to announce that the forces of corruption and venality, against which earlier generations of satirists had railed, had since won the day, leaving the hireling flatterer Peter Pindar as the emblematic poet of a dwindled age.24 This same narrative of historical corruption that circumscribed Peter Pindar’s odes also carried a special significance with regard to America’s political identity. Standing in the immediate background of the Whig-​­infused cries against political corruption during the Revolutionary era, as we have seen, this story had served as a powerful argument for American independence. Against this backdrop, Tucker’s imitation of Peter Pindar’s seemingly cheerful odes contained a powerful and serious critique: that with the creation of the

184   Chapter 5 new federal government—​­particularly, the executive departments that empowered men like Hamilton to appoint bank directors and commissioners—​ t­he corruption and self-​­interest that had brought about the decline of Great Britain has been revived in the American republic. Responding to this situation by imitating Peter Pindar’s signature move of glibly vowing to be the greatest flatterer of his age, Jonathan Pindar satirizes his “patrons” by promising never to reveal any of the ugly truths about the new government that they would prefer to keep hidden: I’ll puff you to the clouds! and, by the pigs, Whilst there its brightest arch the rainbow spreads, Comets shall lend their tails to make your wigs, And powder’d sun-​­beams glitter on your heads. I’ll swear to all the world—​­you never dipp’d In Speculator’s kennel your poor hands; That not a soul of you e’er dealt in script: To prove my words your broker ready stands.25 This tone of mock obsequiousness pervades the majority of Jonathan Pindar’s odes, as is evident in titles like “To a Select Body of Great Men” (addressed to the Federalist-​­controlled Senate) and “To a Would-​­be Great Man” (to John Adams), or in the opening lines of an ode directed simply “To the Well-​­born”: “SONS OF OLYMPUS, all! I kiss your hands, / A stately company, as I’m a sinner!” Embedded in such facetiousness, once again, stands the more sober critique that this very mode of address, with its implied contrast between “great” and “common” men, should be regarded as foreign or outmoded in republican society. Nor is this merely a problem posed by the self-​ ­importance of men like John Adams (whom Jonathan predictably ridicules as a figure who yearns for titles of honor); rather, it is built into the power structure of the federal government itself. Tucker makes this point most explicitly in his odes to Hamilton, whom Jonathan addresses as “Atlas,” a figure who has somehow been permitted to take the whole of the government onto his shoulders: “WHILST you, great ATLAS! prop the state / Nor totter underneath a weight, / That would a giant crush.” And though Jonathan ironically praises the preternatural strength of the “Great CHIEF” and acknowledges that the fate of the people depends on his actions—​­“Nor from your shoulders cast the

The Voice of the People   185 ball, / Lest we, like worms, should drop”—​­the unspoken critique is that no single individual should ever be allowed to wield such power in America.26 A similar argument is made throughout the “Probationary Odes” with regard to the various constitutional arguments raised (the same constitutional arguments, importantly, for which Tucker would be remembered as a judge and legal scholar). One of the unifying motifs running through the series overall is that the federal government has grossly exceeded its constitutional limits. This critique appears, for instance, in the midst of an otherwise wholly approving ode to George Washington, whose title, “a Truly Great Man,” stands in contrast to that of Adams, “a Would-​­be Great Man.” In the midst of expressing his gratitude for Washington’s having “long and nobly serv’d the State,” Jonathan gently chides the president for his decision to charter the National Bank: “But Sir!—­whatever speculators prate, / She gave not the power t’establish BANKS.” A similar point is made by way of Jonathan’s recurrent invocation of the principle of state’s rights, as in his ode to Chief Justice John Jay, whom he calls “Minos,” after the mythological judge of the dead. For the “dead souls” being tried and sentenced by Jay’s court, Jonathan charges, are none other than the individual states themselves, whose authority has been supplanted by both the executive and the judiciary branch: “As moral bodies, STATES, no doubt have Souls! / Which brings them all within thy jurisdiction. / And since no earthly judge thy voice controuls, / They must be damn’d without a legal fiction.”27 Such passages as these illustrate the extent to which the series represented the literary expression of the Old Republican insistence on state’s rights and strict constructionism, which was elsewhere being invoked by fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison, and which would eventually come to be identified most fully with Tucker’s stepson, John Randolph. At a more visceral level, however, these passages communicate the alarming sense, shared by many early Republicans, of having suddenly awoken in a nation that was unrecognizable from the one they thought they had helped found. The same sense of alarm, importantly, was at the same moment giving rise to the formation of ­Democratic-​­Republican societies from Maine to South Carolina, which prompted Tucker, in turn, to weigh in on this development in an ode “To the ­Democratic-​­Republican Society of Philadelphia.” Such societies arose most immediately out of the belief that the “deferential style” that had defined American politics up to that time was inadequate for addressing the concerns of the people; accordingly, the societies allowed (in the words of one supporter)

186   Chapter 5 for a “jealous examination of all the proceedings of administration.” This is the role Jonathan Pindar imagines in what amounts to a mock-​­satiric tribute to the Philadelphia society. Reversing his usual mode of ironic praise, he addresses the members of the society in tones of pretended censure (“SONS of sedition!”) and commands them to halt their efforts to monitor the inner workings of the government, lest they uncover whatever the politicians want most to hide: “Cease then, ye elves of darkness! cease to pry / Into those secrets you’re forbid to know: / Content yourselves to scrutinize the sky; / Presume not to inquire what’s done below!”28 Behind Jonathan’s imagery of laying bare the secrets of the government stands, once again, the discourse of conspiracy as it had come to pervade antiadministration rhetoric, and would soon animate the Democratic-​ ­Republican societies’ opposition to the secrecy surrounding Jay’s negotiation of the treaty with Great Britain. As suggested in the previous ode, Tucker saw in the Democratic clubs a reawakening of the voice of the people as a mode of influencing government policy. At the same time, the series as a whole argues for the corresponding role of a satiric voice of the people to expose and censure a government already on a path ­toward corruption. Thus would Tucker, as the “real” poet controlling the Jonathan Pindar character, give an even more dire assessment of the administration in his second series of “Probationary Odes,” published in book form in 1796, long after the demise of the National Gazette. While never abandoning Jonathan’s signature form of the inverted panegyric, Tucker would allow his own voice to pierce the structural irony of the series with an emphatic appeal for a return of satire as the nation’s last best hope for restoring its earlier political values. Thus the ode “To Panegyric,” where Jonathan facetiously declares the dawn of a new golden age of obsequiousness and vows never to “soil” another page with satire’s “gall”: SATIRE, too long have we endur’d thy reign:

Tyrant, the Guillotine demands thy Head! Mild PANEGYRIC shall thy Throne obtain, And rule by coaxing, as thou doest by dread: Like Milton, she can paint e’en Devils fair, Whilst thou would’st paint them blacker than they are.29 Evident in this passage is the tonal difference between the first and second series of the “Probationary Odes,” as Tucker allows his satiric indignation to

The Voice of the People   187 rise to the surface, displacing Jonathan’s signature joviality with more sinister themes. Particularly important is that such moments occur most especially in odes that, like “To Panegyric,” deal explicitly with the subject of poetry, such as his tribute to his literary precursor, “Cousin Jonathan to Cousin Peter.” In this poem, structured around Jonathan’s invitation to his cousin Peter to visit him in America, the point is not merely to reinforce the formal and ideological parallels between the two Pindar characters but to argue that America, like Britain, is now so far gone in its moral and political decline that the only hope for reversing this course is for satirists like Tucker and Wolcot to respond in more caustic, Juvenalian strains. “Woud’st thou but from thy Zenith, / This infant region to survey,” Jonathan proposes to Peter, I’d shew thee LIBERTY hoodwink’d, and standing Upon the trap-​­door of a dungeon, And mighty ATLAS, with a royal truncheon, His slaves commanding To drop the platform underneath her feet, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ​ I’d shew our fed’ral Constitution torn Like a French Ensign in a naval battle, By that same Atlas and his venal cattle, Laughing to scorn Each cobweb net for conscience it contains, Fetters of pen and ink, and parchment chains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I’d shew those Imps of Darkness, hov’ring round, Like Bats; or Vultures o’er a field of blood; Sucking, like Vampires, their infernal food From many a wound. . . .30 At such moments, the voice of Jonathan, the ironic panegyrist, gives way to the satiric voice of his creator, Tucker, who invokes the high-​­Augustan style of earlier “satires of the times” to indict a nation in which liberty stands ready to be executed at the gibbet, the constitution has been ripped to shreds, and “imps of darkness” feed like vampires off of the misfortunes of their fellow citizens. Yet beyond the dire imagery, what is most significant about this ode is that Tucker envisions himself not as a lone voice of the people in his efforts to

188   Chapter 5 lay bare such truths but as part of a transatlantic community of like-​­minded satirists. In “Cousin Jonathan to Cousin Peter,” this community is symbolized by Tucker’s literary kinship with Wolcot, a fellow satirist engaged in an analogous campaign to root out corruption in his own country. Yet it is also apparent in the opening poem of the second series, in which Jonathan, apologizing for taking so long to bring his newer poems before the public, jokingly curses his fellow poet and erstwhile publisher Freneau for no longer having a newspaper in which to disseminate his work: “That rogue FRENEAU has left me in the lurch, / Or, I’d been with you early in the Winter.” Even more, Tucker represents this community of poets as engaged in a struggle against a distinct group of literary adversaries—​­the Hartford Wits, who were still the most prolific group of political satirists in America. Indeed, as we saw briefly in the last chapter, Tucker chose to include in the second series an ode “To Echo,” in which Jonathan symbolically emasculates his rivals by comparing their parodic style to idle female gossip: “But flippant as a modern female grown, / In Congress shalt thou take thy seat, / And, speeches, there, an hour long repeat.”31 Ironically, at the very moment Tucker was invoking this notion of rival literary-​­political alliances, pitting himself and Freneau against their common Connecticut adversaries, he would be answered in print by an entirely new contingent of Federalist poets, who would explicitly challenge Tucker’s claim to the title of “American” Peter Pindar. This new group of satirists formed in the mid-​­1790s around Joseph Dennie, who had recently taken over the editorship of the Farmer’s Weekly Museum in Walpole, New Hampshire, and had set about transforming it into one of the most widely read American publications of the decade. Dennie’s later role as the creator of the long-​­running Federalist literary magazine the Port Folio is well known to scholars of the early republic; yet Dennie is also notable for briefly and improbably turning the tiny village of Walpole into a center of American literary activity, with the Museum serving as the hub of a diffuse network of poets and essayists. Less well remembered is that a significant plurality of the poems published during Dennie’s tenure at the Museum involved the same stylistic motif of imitating or alluding to Peter Pindar, with the obvious purpose of challenging Tucker’s claim—​­and more generally the claim of any Republican poet—​­to be the “true” successor to John Wolcot.32 In the years spanning Dennie’s editorship, no fewer than five series of odes by “American Pindars” appeared in the Farmer’s Weekly Museum, with obviously allusive names like “Peter Pencil,” “Peter Quince,” and “Simon Spunky.”

The Voice of the People   189 Such imitators followed Tucker’s Jonathan in mimicking the signature characteristics of the original series and, in many cases, in claiming a similarly familial relationship with Peter Pindar. Yet beyond merely offering such personae as later participants in a literary vogue originated by Tucker, the Museum series also included a political subtext suggesting that Tucker had betrayed the true spirit of Peter Pindar when, in the process of satirizing the administration, he veered ­toward a wholehearted enthusiasm for Jacobinism. Tucker had, in fact, expressed his unflinching enthusiasm t­ oward the French Revolution, going so far as to declare, in an ode “To Liberty,” that she was a “Cast-​­off mistress” in America, though “still to GALLIA dear.” And indeed, this response was a dramatic departure from Wolcot’s own views, as the latter had penned numerous odes explicitly ridiculing Thomas Paine and other proponents of the Revolution. This divergence opened the way for the new breed of Peter Pindar imitators in the Farmer’s Weekly Museum to turn their satire back against the overtly pro-​­French Democratic-​­Republican societies. Thus, for instance, “Peter Hothead,” in a poem declaring himself “Poet Laureate to a Democratic Society,” offers a parody of Tucker’s Jonathan as he rouses the “sons of faction” to stir up resistance to the Jay Treaty, even to the point of accusing President Washington of selling out his country: “There’s WASHINGTON, and there is JAY, / Their country’s interests would betray, / Behold in faction’s annals written, / They’ve sold America to Britain.”33 The Peter Hothead series proved politically important in recasting the Jonathan Pindar character in an altogether negative light, as a literary demagogue who uses poetry to incite antigovernment resentment, with little or no concern for the consequences of his rhetoric. This effort to neutralize the appeal of Jonathan Pindar, in turn, provided space for Isaac Story’s “Peter Quince,” David Everett’s “Peter Pencil,” and Thomas Green Fessenden’s “Simon Spunky,” all of whom appeared in the Museum at different periods between 1796 and 1800. This later group of Peter Pindar imitators would draw on many of the same character traits and stylistic motifs that had made Wolcot’s original an appealing figure, but they would consciously reclaim them in the name of Federalism. Thus Simon Spunky addressed his series of mock panegyrics to Republican senators like Matthew Lyon and James Gunn, while Peter Quince reminded his readers that his cousin Peter was, like him, an enemy of Jacobinism. “Was it not you,” he asks in an ode directed to Wisdom personified, “who drove my cousin Peter, / To say the Jacobins had stinking souls—​­/ Had consciences as black as coals”?34 Despite their limited

190   Chapter 5 stylistic and thematic variation, what held together the Peter Pindar imitators in the Farmer’s Weekly Museum was their shared insistence that literary Federalism represented the true legacy of John Wolcot’s verse. The conflict between Tucker and his Federalist counterparts over rival claims to the Peter Pindar legacy was ultimately a product not only of the broad appeal of Wolcot’s persona but also of the ambiguity surrounding Peter’s political identity. Yet ironically Peter Pindar’s universal popularity among poets on both sides of the American political divide—​­with each declaring him an essential ally in their own satiric warfare—​­served to weaken the satiric force of any such imitative gesture. It was one thing to declare oneself (as Tucker was the first to do) the “American Peter Pindar,” for it called upon a host of literary and ideological resonances that lent immediate weight to one’s political position. Yet when not one but four or five American Pindars were simultaneously making such claims, the symbolic potency of the allusion itself became diluted, such that Peter Quince, Simon Spunky, and even Jonathan Pindar himself ultimately seemed mere imitators of Wolcot as opposed to deliberate imitators employing literary form to communicate ideological content. As we shall see in Chapter 6, this episode would anticipate the broader literary-​­political dynamic of the late 1790s, in which nearly every new political verse form would be promptly countered in a similar poetic form representing the opposing political side. Political verse would be more ubiquitous than ever before, but its cultural and political significance would be paradoxically diminished by this very ubiquity, as each individual satiric voice would blend into the next in a sort of literary-​­political cacophony. The other irony surrounding the publication of “The Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar” is that though Tucker would use the series to invoke a community of Republican wits to counter the “Echo” group, such a community would never fully materialize. After 1796, Tucker would himself turn to composing legal treatises rather than satiric odes, and while his erstwhile associate Freneau would continue to pen protests against the Jay Treaty and tributes to the French Revolution, his impressive output of political verse would wane in the latter half of the 1790s. Other poets representing Tucker’s political viewpoint would, to be sure, weigh in on the political controversies of the day, but they would usually do so individually, with none of the overt gestures to literary kinship that had characterized the Jonathan Pindar series. By contrast, as we shall also see, Federalist poets would prove not only more numerous and more prolific than their Republican counterparts but also

The Voice of the People   191 more likely to conceive of themselves as part of a conscious community of wit and satire.

The (Mock) Epic Struggle over the Jay Treaty Of all the political conflicts that emerged in the first years of the federal administration, over such issues as funding and the National Bank, none proved as intense as the controversy that arose over the attempt to resolve the nation’s lingering diplomatic disputes with Great Britain. The central episode in this story, John Jay’s negotiation of a new treaty with Britain in 1794, rose nearly to the level of a domestic political crisis, both for the administration and its opponents. The details of the treaty itself (having to do with transatlantic trade, outstanding debt, and territorial cession) hardly explain the intensity of the public outcry against its ratification by the Democratic-​­Republican societies and their Republican allies. Yet to focus on the terms of the treaty (finalizing Britain’s exit from the Northwest Territory and giving American ships limited trading rights with British colonies) is to miss the point of the Jay Treaty controversy, which was ultimately about two other, more pressing issues. The first involved America’s national identity in the context of imperial rivalry between Britain and France. The second involved the question of how beholden the administration should be to the voice of the people. The prospect of resolving territorial and trading disputes with Britain raised the ire, first and foremost, of the Francophile leaders of the Democratic societies, who called for a closer alliance with America’s long-​­standing ally and sister republic. Yet the Jay Treaty was also a test case for the broader question of the societies’ role in influencing federal policy. For in publicly demonstrating against the very idea of a new treaty with Britain, the societies were acting on the assumption that the people, for whom they claimed to speak, had a right to influence policy directly by making their demands known to their elected representatives. By contrast, Federalists’ support for the treaty arose not only out of the belief that a closer trading relationship with Britain was in America’s economic interests but also out of suspicion ­toward these so-​­called self-​­created societies, as Washington famously referred to them. Add to this the fact that the specific provisions of the treaty pitted the interests of Northern merchants against those of Southern slaveholders (still awaiting remuneration for their loss of slave property in the Revolution) and Hamiltonian capitalists against Jeffersonian agrarians, and one grasps why, in the words of

192   Chapter 5 one political historian of the period, the Jay Treaty “divided the country as no other . . . ​in the history of the young republic.”35 Like the other political conflicts of the 1790s, the disagreements over the Jay Treaty inspired partisan verse from both sides, ranging from diatribes accusing Jay of betraying American interests to counterattacks against the “demagogues” who opposed the treaty.36 Yet more than other controversies, the Jay Treaty gave rise to longer, more substantial works—​­in particular, a succession of mock-​­epic poems, all penned by members of the second-​­generation Connecticut Wits. The works that made up this mock-​­epic vogue of 1794–1795 shared a common purpose of broadening the treaty controversy into a debate about democratization as a whole, and more specifically, about the Democratic societies’ claim that they should be afforded a greater role in shaping foreign policy. The emphasis of the Jay Treaty mock epics was less on foreign policy debates as such than on fundamental models of political governance, as we glimpse immediately in their titles: Democracy: An Epic Poem (attributed to Elihu Hubbard Smith); Aristocracy: An Epic Poem (attributed to Richard Alsop); and The Democratiad (by fellow “Echo” contributor, Lemuel Hopkins). In addition to lending political momentousness to the treaty controversy, the three mock epics are important within the history of American political verse for the way they were combined into an interrelated series that brought to the poetry wars of the 1790s a level of self-​­conscious literary complexity not seen since “The Anarchiad.” Indeed, in composing Democracy: An Epic Poem and Aristocracy: An Epic Poem, the Wits drew directly on their Connecticut predecessors’ experiment in creating a fictionalized public sphere—​­in this case, devising a fictional poetry war between rival mock epics, which simulated the back-​­and-​­forth dynamic of other partisan exchanges. Yet this time, the fictional exchange served the purpose of pulling off an elaborate and unprecedented satiric ruse, which even employed the Republican press unwittingly to manipulate their readers into misinterpreting the poems’ political purpose. And in a move anticipating a level of textual self-​­consciousness more often associated with postmodernism, the Wits embedded that misinterpretation into the overall meaning of the series as it unfolded, all to expose the ­Democratic-​­Republican movement as an inherently humorless and politically paranoid literary audience. This satiric exposé unfolded gradually over the course of the three mock epics of 1794–1795, each building on a satiric motif introduced by its predecessor. Though the series eventually centered on the discontent voiced against

The Voice of the People   193 the Jay Treaty, the satiric attack actually began before Jay himself was even commissioned to negotiate the treaty, when an earlier foreign policy crisis (having to do with the capture of American ships by Algerian pirates) raised public concerns about America’s diplomatic impasse with Britain. In December 1793, news arrived that Britain had arranged a truce between Algiers and Portugal, removing a major impediment to the Algerian pirates’ routine seizures of commercial vessels, including those from the United States. As the episode was characterized in the Republican press, George III was “daily insulting . . . ​and plundering . . . ​us, and instigating others to do the like, by sea and land, vide Indians and Algerines.” Out of this perceived threat, a group of concerned “Citizens of New-​­York” called a meeting at the Tontine Coffee House in February 1794 for the purpose of “entering into some resolutions, instructive to our Representatives in Congress, respecting the insults, embarrassments and injuries offered to the Commerce of Country by Britain and her savage allies.”37 Notwithstanding its call to all concerned citizens, the anti-​­British language of the announcement made it obvious that this was a rally intended for self-​­described Republicans; indeed, the event’s speakers and those charged with drafting the resolutions were all members of the newly formed New York Democratic Society. Though some Federalists complained about the purpose of the gathering—​­one writer described it as an extraconstitutional ploy to “dragoon Congress” into adopting anti-​­British measures—​­the event was generally deemed a success, particularly in terms of the number of people in attendance. As the New-​­York Journal noted, the crowd of “1500 citizens” that gathered was deemed too large for the coffeehouse, and thus made its way to City Hall. Such a show of political strength was apparently considerable enough to convince at least one Federalist wit (perhaps Elihu Hubbard Smith, who had recently relocated to New York City from Connecticut) that the most effective response would be to commemorate the event in mock-​­epic form. A week later, a pamphlet purporting to be the first canto of Democracy: An Epic Poem, by Aquiline Nimble-​­Chops, Democrat was advertised for sale.38 As a mock-​­heroic depiction of a town meeting, Democracy: An Epic Poem corresponds closely with John McWilliams’s characterization of American mock epic as engaging chiefly with the question of whether “law can restrain demagoguery” or republican government “can withstand popular stupidity or violence.” Like Trumbull’s M’Fingal, the poem satirizes a community of speakers by portraying them as a motley collection of Popean dunces. Yet unlike

194   Chapter 5 M’Fingal, which had employed mock-​­heroic conventions as a strategy for symbolically ushering imperial Britain off the historical stage—​­thus opening space for an American republic worthy of being celebrated in true epic form—​ ­ emocracy uses the same conventions to suggest that the republic may already D be undergoing its own decline from a once-​­glorious past to a diminished present. Thus, in the poem’s opening invocation to the muse, the speaker implies that in an era ostensibly defined by the fall of kings, a new kind of democratic despotism is emerging in its place: “What deeds of glory grace these later days, / Of earth the wonder, and of men the praise; / How, while, around, all single despots die, / Tumultuous throngs the vacant thrones supply.”39 Following The Dunciad, Democracy depicts a chaotic and occasionally violent assembly, made up of figures ranging from local political leaders, merchants, and lawyers to shopkeepers and mechanics. Though the presence of the latter orders may tempt readers to interpret the satire according to a simple binary opposing a Federalist elite and a Republican working class, such a reading is belied by the satiric portraits of the poem’s principal “dunces,” which includes numerous wealthy and politically connected figures, such as various members of the Livingston family, Dr. Samuel Mitchell of Columbia College, and Commodore James Nicholson, among others. Largely sidestepping issues of social status, the poem emphasizes that its crucial satiric categories are political and ideological, with its main target being the shared belief among all those gathered that they represent the “guardians of the land,” and that it is their prerogative to determine if the “Wheel of Government” is in disrepair, and if so, whether to “mend the old one up, or make a new.” Underlying this critique, of course, is the classical view of direct democracy as the mirror image of despotism, equally opposed to true republican government, as one of the speakers at the demonstration openly acknowledges: “Sure from this day democracy shall rise, / Spread thro’ the earth, and triumph o’er the skies; / Before its power all Government shall fly, / And at its presence each Republic die.” At the same time, the satire hinges not merely on political philosophy but on the tendency of those on the democratic side to issue reckless and sometimes violent demands in the name of responding to the vox populi, as in the various calls by the demonstration’s speakers for full-​­scale war against Britain: “The English take your vessels, steal your goods,—​­/ Let’s fight them, every man, curse take their bloods! / Wait not for negotiation—​­that won’t do—​­/ But fight ’em, burn ’em—​­beat ’em, black and blue.”40 As with Federalist satire of French Revolutionary fervor, Democracy

The Voice of the People   195 depicts the leaders of the demonstration as more than simply zealous partisans: they have crossed over into something more like a separate ideological reality. One glimpses this, first, in the outlandish claims made by the s­peakers—​ i­ncluding, for instance, an accusation of the existence of an international axis that formed when “The Sons of Britain and of Algiers join’d, / And with the Western Indians both combin’d.” Yet a similar critique is also built into the poem’s titular claim to the category of epic, for even more insistently than most mock epics, Democracy goes to great lengths to maintain the fiction that the poem was actually intended as “an Epic Poem” in earnest, composed by an actual “Democrat.” (Indeed, the pseudonymous “author,” “Aqualine Nimble-​ c­ hops” is a comic reference to the real-​­life Brockholst Livingston, one of the leaders of the actual demonstration). In this sense, the poem presents itself not as a simple mock epic but as an accidental one, penned by a would-​­be Democratic bard who is himself unaware of the ludicrous aspect of the “grand Meeting at the TONTINE” that he has set out to record.41 This, too, is a familiar Augustan satiric device, going back to the various purported works of Martinus Scriblerus, the fictitious pedantic annotator of Pope’s Peri Bathous and The Dunciad Variorum, who was similarly oblivious to the fact that his “serious” commentary was being ridiculed by the work as a whole. The Augustan term for this form of false consciousness, of course, was “dulness,” and one of the purposes of invoking a Scriblerian author in Democracy was to suggest that the emerging opposition party has descended into a kind of political or ideological dullness, which has not only clouded their understanding of foreign and domestic policy but also, what is more important, inflated their own self-​­importance as the saviors of an imperiled republic. Indeed, the latter point is the subject of an unpublished sequel to the poem—​­“Democracy  .  .  . ​Canto Second”—​­which portrays the leading figures of the Tontine meeting encountering the advertisement for Democracy: An Epic Poem in their morning paper and eagerly poring through the poem in hopes of finding themselves immortalized as epic heroes by Aquiline Nimble-​ ­chops. Yet on realizing that the poem is “nothing but satire”—​­that they have been tricked by the poem’s ironic self-​­representation—​­they angrily curse the real Federalist poet whose burlesque has exposed, even to themselves, the vanity of their epic ambitions.42 According to Richard Alsop, the second canto of Democracy was submitted for publication but never appeared in print because of the “timidity of . . . ​ booksellers” afraid to offend prominent city leaders. Yet though the unpublished

196   Chapter 5 fragment did not play a direct role in the poetry wars of the 1790s, “Democracy . . . ​Canto Second” nevertheless exerted an indirect influence on the Jay Treaty controversy by foreshadowing in fictional terms an actual literary prank that the same group of Federalist wits attempted to pull off a few months later. Having written a poem depicting the New York Democrats as gulled into purchasing a poem that they thought supported their own political ideology, only to find themselves the butt of the satire, Alsop and his fellow wits set out to test whether such a scenario might actually play out in the public sphere. The result was Aristocracy: An Epic Poem, on one level a satire against the rising Republican senator from New York, Aaron Burr, while on another an elaborate burlesque intended, once again, to expose the irrationality of the Democratic-​­Republican worldview—​­particularly, their tendency to regard the Jay Treaty as evidence of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by the administration. Remarkably, the trick involved using an arm of the Republican press as an unwitting participant in a satiric game of bait and switch, as is suggested in an advertisement that appeared in Benjamin Bache’s arch-​­Republican Aurora in early 1795 (see Figure 5): ARISTOCRACY,

AN EPIC POEM—​­BOOK FIRST, THIS DAY PUBLISHED. . . .

The author of this little book will repurchase of any one who, on perusal, will say he has not got the worth of his money. N.B. All applications must be attended with proof that the applicant is not an aristocrat, which class of people are hereby notified not to purchase, as this book contains no gratification for them.43

For those enticed by the advertisement into proving their antiaristocratic bona fides and purchasing a copy of Aristocracy: An Epic Poem, its title and preface appeared to confirm that it was published in retaliation for Democracy: An Epic Poem. In the preface, the reader is addressed by the “editor,” who cites Washington’s recent censure of the Democratic-​­Republican societies as the occasion for this poem’s publication: “AT a time like the present . . . ​when the executive and legislative powers have united to denounce the POPULAR SOCIETIES . . . ​it behoves every lover of this country, every advocate for the equal rights of man, to awake from the dream of delusive security, and exert every energy of his nature, to enlighten and preserve his fellow-​­citizens.” At the

The Voice of the People   197

Figure 5. Advertisement for Aristocracy. An Epic Poem in the Philadelphia Aurora, Feb. 6, 1795. As part of the elaborate ruse of representing Aristocracy. An Epic Poem as a satirical attack against the “aristocratic” Federalists, the author advertised the poem in the archRepublican Aurora and even demanded that potential buyers provide proof that they were not themselves aristocrats. American Antiquarian Society.

same time, as the editor explains, the point of Aristocracy is to expose a very different threat to national security: for though the “DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES have been stigmatized by opprobrious epithets of Anarchists and Disorganizers,” this is nothing more than a misdirection created by “a dangerous Coalition” which exists “(actively, if not formally) to destroy the general influence of the people.” The real danger to America, he goes on to say, is “the spirit of Aristocracy,” which has remained alive since the end of the Revolution. Independence may have prevented Britain’s designs to “saddle us with a hereditary nobility,” but it has not destroyed that “secret longing which had been excited by the artifices of the vile instruments of the mother country.” Indeed, he charges, there have been numerous attempts to restore aristocracy to America, and the following poem recounts one such plot.44 The three-​­hundred-​­line poem that follows seems to support such insinuations, telling the story of a vague plot, led by a figure known as “Aristus,” to thwart “Freedom’s progress” in favor of “the bliss divine, / In lordly pomp and titled pride to shine; / While, bent beneath their oligarchic sway, / Their

198   Chapter 5 native land should tremble and obey.” This is familiar antiadministration language, the likes of which we have encountered in The Dangerous Vice ‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑ and in Jonathan Pindar’s odes, and it recalls as well the tradition of conspiracy poems going back to Freneau’s earliest attacks on American Loyalists. As the preface suggests and the narrative of Part 1 confirms, this epic poem on the struggle to restore aristocracy to America is, like its precursor, Democracy, not so much a mock epic as an inverted serious epic, meant to celebrate the virtues of oligarchy and oppression of the people. The speaker wholeheartedly advocates such upside-​­down political values, referring to Aristus and his allies as “Heroes” and “Illustrious chiefs,” and the “editor” claims in the preface that the poem was composed by one of Aristus’s close allies, suggesting that the text of the poem is itself documentary proof of the conspiracy described in it. As the editor explains mysteriously, in the course of investigating the true character of America’s political leaders, “the following POEM . . . ​fell into my hands.45 That the identity of “Aristus” would ultimately be revealed to be Aaron Burr, who was at that very moment emerging as one of the leaders of the Republican opposition, is hardly hinted at in “Book First” of the poem. What is hinted is that “Aristus” may be an alias for John Jay, since Aristocracy tells the story of a meeting and a clandestine agreement made between Aristus and a mysterious European envoy. Amid the controversy that raged in the fall of 1794 over Jay’s appointment, which was heating up again in anticipation of the treaty’s arrival in Philadelphia in March 1795, this interpretation was understandable. Yet any reader making such an inference was in for a rude awakening later that same month, when Aristocracy: Book Second appeared. For in the course of the second installment’s gradual disclosure of the details of Aristus’s biography, it would become evident that Aristus’s story contained numerous parallels to Aaron Burr’s public life: Aristus’s childhood home, like Burr’s, “bears the Albion virgin’s name” (Elizabeth-​­town, New Jersey); like Burr, Aristus was passed over for promotion during the Revolution, having never been one of General Washington’s favorites; and like Burr, Aristus hesitated before aligning himself with either side in the constitutional debate, only later agreeing to join forces with the Jeffersonian opposition. By the end of “Book Second,” then, it was clear that the man whom the poem’s editor has described as the head of a “dangerous Coalition . . . ​to destroy the influence of the people” is, at least in name, a Republican.46 Nor was this simply a case of throwing the ideologically charged epithet

The Voice of the People   199 “aristocratic” back at the party of Jefferson and Burr. For in addition to reminding readers of the irony that a patrician figure like Burr (the grandson and son of successive presidents of Princeton) had risen to leadership among the Republicans, the poem raised the question of what, precisely, was meant by the so-​­called aristocratic threat to the American republic. As the fictitious editor explained in the preface, the danger posed by the “spirit of aristocracy” is the “establishment of undue influence in the hands of any particular description of citizens.” Yet insofar as the same concentration of power could be achieved by cultivating one’s personal popularity among the demos, the rise of a class of politicians like Burr—​­pretending to represent the voice of the people while actually constituting an aristocracy in practice—​­posed a different, though no less frightening possibility for a republic founded on such principles as disinterested virtue and the public good. This possibility is realized gradually and retrospectively over the chronology of the poem’s two books, as the reader recalls the oligarchic language of Aristus’s early speeches and suddenly grasps its connection to the political style represented by Burr: “Yes, fond Presumption bids me hope, ere long,” Aristus proclaims, “Aided by thee, to bend the vulgar throng; / With titled friends, in pomp sublime, to move, / And hold by Fear what now I gain by Love.”47 Such lines provide the poem’s main satiric thrust, attacking both Burr’s political character and the perceived tendency of democracy to lead to demagoguery and even authoritarianism (as would soon be symbolized by the ascendancy of Bonaparte on the ashes of the French Revolution). Yet beyond this the poem advances another charge against Burr and his political allies that more closely links the poem to the Jay Treaty controversy. In addition to identifying Aristus as Burr, the second book of Aristocracy also reveals that the foreign envoy who conspires with him is an agent not of “aristocratic” Britain but of Revolutionary France: in fact, the envoy turns out to be none other than Citizen Edmond-​­Charles Genêt, and his secret meeting with Aristus takes place during Genêt’s ill-​­fated diplomatic mission of the previous year. The poem portrays Genêt as a version of Burr—​­a republican imposter seeking to ride a wave of radical democracy in order to fulfill his personal ambitions. Yet the reference to Genêt contains an additional reminder that was highly significant amid the treaty controversy: at one point in “Book Second,” the envoy pays tribute to his mentor, the comte de Vergennes—​­Genêt’s own real-​ ­life diplomatic mentor. As those who had lived through the American Revolution recalled, Vergennes had been the principal French negotiator of the Paris

200   Chapter 5 Peace Treaty of 1783, and his most formidable counterpart in those negotiations was none other than Jay, whose bold moves during the talks were credited with securing the territory east of the Mississippi River for the United States.48 Against the backdrop of this “second” Jay Treaty, the Vergennes allusion served, first, to remind readers of Jay’s past diplomatic successes and, second, to suggest a link between the opposition of Republicans to a new British treaty and their open or unacknowledged allegiance to Revolutionary France. Given Burr’s distinction of being the only Northern senator to vote against the appointment of Jay in the first place, and the spokesman for the Senate minority who voted against ratification, the publication of Aristrocracy in March 1795 constituted a powerful preemptive strike against the antitreaty protestors. As for the elaborate misrepresentation of poem’s true meaning—​­particularly, the act of using the Democratic Aurora to pass off the poem as proof of an aristocratic conspiracy—​­there is no evidence that any actual readers were tricked into purchasing what would turn out to be a satire on one of their own party leaders. Yet the very prospect must have delighted Alsop and the other wits who were in on the satiric hoax. For what the poem as ruse offered was a clear distinction between two kinds of readers and republican citizens, made manifest by the act of literary interpretation itself. On one side stood those who recognized and appreciated the complex irony that unfolds in Aristocracy and who, as a result, identified themselves as part of an intellectually (and, by extension, politically) sophisticated community. On the other side stood those who, at least in theory, had sought out the poem in the hope of confirming their political suspicions, only to discover that those suspicions were themselves the object of ridicule. In this sense, the ultimate target of Aristocracy was neither Burr nor the burgeoning opposition party but the discourse of conspiracy that animated that opposition and encouraged its members to regard Adams, Jay, and even Washington as plotting against the people’s interests. Yet such conspiratorial rhetoric only intensified in the months following the treaty’s arrival in the capital, as the Republican press decried Washington’s decision to keep the details of the agreement secret until the Senate finished deliberating over its ratification. Surely, wrote one writer in the Aurora, “the mysterious manner” in which the treaty originated, and “the secrecy with which it was carried on, . . . ​are circumstances which warrant suspicion.” Indeed, wrote another, “How does the secrecy of the Senate . . . ​comport with THE SOVEREIGNTY of the people?” By the end of June, this call for govern-

The Voice of the People   201 mental transparency was answered, when Virginia senator Stevens T. Mason leaked the text of the treaty to Bache, who immediately printed it as a pamphlet and arranged for it to be sold in time for the Democratic societies’ Fourth of July festivals. The exposure of the treaty text as a “secret document,” prior to its presentation to the public as duly ratified by the Senate, had a dramatic effect on its reception. Demonstrations were organized in cities from Boston to Charleston in July and August 1795, with Democratic-​­Republican leaders portraying it as the first step in a larger scheme to subordinate America’s power and interests to those of Britain.49 Amid this environment of suspicion and protest, Republican poets, led by Freneau, entered the fray. In a balled entitled “Mr. Jay’s Treaty,” set to the tune of “Derry Down,” Freneau gave voice to the argument that the treaty controversy had arisen chiefly because of the deliberate attempt by the aristocratic Senate to conceal its actions from the eyes of the public: “WHEN the Senate assembled and shut up their door, / And had left us no clue their designs to explore / The people were anxious & whispered their care, / But their voice was too weak for the dignified ear. / Ye are down, down, down, keep ye down.” The exception to this characterization, of course, was Senator Mason, who is portrayed as the people’s hero. His leak of confidential information is described as an act of “enlighten[ing] our eyes,” such that “a cloud from all quarters begins to arise,” revealing a deeper truth that had been for too long obscured: “Vox Dei, Vox Populi, truly but one, / Shall tell dark designers—​­our will shall be done / ’Till you’re down, down, twenty times down.”50 Freneau’s ballad was one of several pro-​­Mason poems that transformed the treaty controversy into a full-​­fledged poetry war, with the Federalist counterattack coming in the form of the third mock epic to be published by a Connecticut Wit, Lemuel Hopkins’s Democratiad. Though the title highlights its resemblance to Democracy: An Epic Poem and Aristocracy: An Epic Poem, and while it shares with these earlier works a thematic emphasis on Republican-​ ­held conspiracy theories, Hopkins’s poem was less a third installment in a mock-​­epic sequence than a self-​­proclaimed “poem in retaliation” against another body of antitreaty texts then in circulation. As I noted in my Introduction, The Democratiad originally appeared in August 1795 as the eighteenth installment of “The Echo,” and it announces itself most immediately as a verse parody of Mason’s letter to the Aurora justifying his decision to violate Senate rules and leak the treaty to Bache. Drawing on Mason’s insistence in the letter that the “full and accurate knowledge” of the treaty has “been improperly

202   Chapter 5 withheld from them,” the poem begins by portraying Mason as consumed by suspicion ­toward the very lawmaking body to which he belongs: No haughty Senate by its tyrant laws, Shall longer lock our democratic jaws. Perish their secrets—​­laws were made for fools—​­ True Democrats despise the Senate and its rules. In pure Republics secrets ne’er exist, Knowledge, like wind, should blow where e’er it list.51 Yet perhaps because Mason’s mistrust of government amounted only to one part of the poem’s larger purpose, The Democratiad soon dispenses with its earlier pretense to parody and morphs instead into a conventional mock epic in the Dunciad tradition, satirizing in succession the ten Republican senators who voted against ratification of the treaty, and then turning to the leaders of the Democratic societies who were inciting the public demonstrations. This latter move accounts for why Hopkins renamed The Democratiad when he republished as in pamphlet form a month later in the federal capital. At the same time, as is suggested in the later edition’s subtitle—​­A Poem in Retaliation, for the “Philadelphia Jockey Club”—​­the poem also presents itself as engaging in a new political context. Referring to a pamphlet that had appeared earlier that year (which accused several Philadelphia merchants of being pawns of the British government for their support of the treaty), this subtitle highlights another level at which the treaty debate was being shaped by the discourse of conspiracy: as The Philadelphia Jockey Club had insinuated, support for the treaty could only be understood as arising from the economic self-​­interest of the merchant class. The specific retaliation offered by The Democratiad thus consisted of a satiric counternarrative in which the Republican leaders were engaging in a cynical strategy to further their political ambitions by provoking an irrationally suspicious response among their movement’s rank and file. This strategy is evident from the moment in The Democratiad at which Mason admits that his decision to leak the contents of the treaty to the press—​­to “let the cat out of the senate bag”—​­was all along meant to drum up antitreaty sentiment among the popular societies “Before their passions have a chance to flag.” The same point is made in the poem’s recounting of the various protests against the treaty in Boston, New York, Charleston, and else-

The Voice of the People   203 where, which argues that when the crowds publicly condemn the treaty, they are actually denouncing a fictional treaty, fabricated by their leaders and bearing no resemblance to the treaty as written: So said—​­so done. With Democratic view They saw the direful Treaty thro’ and thro’, And tho’ it stood unread, and unexplain’d, They found much in it that it ne’er contain’d; The vote was pass’d; each blockhead rais’d his hand, And tho’t himself, no doubt, the saviour of the land.52 Like Democracy and Aristocracy, this mock epic represents the members of the Democratic-​­Republican movement as having enclosed themselves in a cocoon of ideological delusion about both the treaty and their own imaginary role as “saviors of the land.” At the same time, as Hopkins here insists, his is not an act of retaliation against the voice of the people but an argument that the societies’ claim to represent the vox populi is tenuous at best. For the ostensibly grassroots protest is actually a reflection of the views of a limited faction of Democratic leaders working in concert, from Burr and Mason in the Senate to powerful local politicians like the Livingstons, and of influential printers like Benjamin Bache. Of course, the great irony surrounding Hopkins’s counterargument—​­that the widespread antitreaty sentiment is the result of a concerted effort by an identifiable group of demagogues to manipulate the common people—​­is that in making this claim Hopkins descends into the very logic of conspiracy that his fellow Federalist wits had satirized in their earlier mock epics. At times, Hopkins employs similarly paranoid rhetoric in portraying the Democratic societies as breeding grounds for seditious activity, where “there collect the refuse of mankind, / Prepared for treasons, and for plots design’d.” And just as earlier conspiracy poets had called up demonic images in their exposés, at a crucial moment in The Democratiad Hopkins dispenses with the mock-​­epic tone that governs the early part of the poem and begins to grieve that his beloved country—​­“The land where Freedom builds her blest abode”—​­has in a short time been reduced to a haven for “Civic Feasts, dark Clubs, and Riots fell, / The plots of Traitors, and the lies of Hell.”53 This is the sense in which The Democratiad reads not merely as a mock-​ ­epic response to the Republican obsession with conspiracy but also as a

204   Chapter 5 counterconspiracy narrative that allowed Hopkins and other Federalists to dismiss the Jay Treaty protests without having to ascribe their antitreaty sentiment to the people as a whole. This distinction solved an acute problem for Federalists observing the rise of the Democratic-​­Republican movement, particularly in light of Federalists’ long-​­standing claim to represent reason and moderation in contrast to unsophisticated, irrational responses of the opposition. The implicit risk of this earlier strategy, as we have seen, was that it made the Federalists vulnerable to countercharges of elitism. To nullify such criticism, as Hopkins seems instinctively to have realized, it was necessary to separate the members of the “Democratic faction” from the larger category of “the people.” Yet this move, paradoxically, involved invoking a conspiracy theory of their own, in which a small cabal of demagogues, propelled by ambition and a cunning awareness of how power could be wielded in an increasingly democratized state, was actively working to convince a significant subset of the people to delegitimize and ultimately threaten their own constitutionally established government. As we shall see, out of such logic would arise another, more sweeping and influential, conspiracy narrative—​­one involving Enlightenment philosophes, French Revolutionaries, and Bavarian Illuminati. This is the narrative that would provide some disillusioned Federalists, in the last years of the decade, with a mechanism for making sense of the rise of Republicanism in France and America, as well as the Federalists’ own subsequent political defeat. Notwithstanding the intensity of the demonstrations against it, the Jay Treaty ultimately passed in the Congress: efforts by the Republican-​­controlled House of Representatives to deny its funding were defeated by a Federalist-​ o­ rganized petition campaign urging Congress to support the treaty. Bookended as it was by opposing examples of the mobilization of citizens to bring political pressure on elected officials, the Jay Treaty episode is remembered as a significant moment in the formation of distinct parties, which—​­as the narrowly decided presidential election of 1796 illustrated—​­were roughly equal in popularity.54 At the same time, the recognition, after 1796, of the existence of full-​­fledged political parties (each with its own social, economic, and regional base) meant different things for the respective partisans themselves. For Republican poets like Freneau and Tucker, invested in a narrative that pitted the vast body of common people against aristocrats and speculators, the existence of rival parties complicated this narrative by reminding them that at least a share of the people continued to support a government that actively conspired

The Voice of the People   205 against their interests. Yet despite a few moments in which Tucker seemed to despair that the forces of satire might not be enough to expose the administration’s corruption, the progressive narrative to which he and most Republicans subscribed projected a future in which the truth would be revealed and the people sufficiently enlightened. By contrast, the emerging dynamic of full-​­fledged parties seemed, at first, to validate the Federalist wits’ strategy in Democracy and Aristocracy of dividing the public into rival audiences, one characterized by wit, reason, and sophistication and the other by paranoia and ideological extremism. By circumscribing the Republican master narrative of an aristocratic conspiracy within these categories, Federalists sought to undermine both the specific claims of the conspiracy theory itself and the underlying assumption that the Republicans alone championed the vox populi. Yet this same logic posed the question: If the Democratic-​­Republican movement had indeed been made up of men whose minds were clouded by delusion, from where did such false ideas arise? The answer, according to the same Federalist poets, lay in a version of the familiar figure of the “factious demagogue” first invoked in Loyalist verse—​­a villain who recklessly incited antigovernment resentment in the hopes of riding the wave of anger into power. The political risk posed by such a trope, as seen in the case of The Democratiad, was that it mirrored the conspiratorial reasoning that Federalists had earlier lampooned as politically paranoid. And though scarcely discernible in 1795, within only a few years members of the same group of Connecticut Wits would attempt to explain the rise of the Democratic-​­Republican movement by means of a conspiracy narrative more sweeping than anything their Republican opponents had proposed. This is, of course, the theory of the Bavarian Illuminati, which would weave together the ideas of the French philosophes, the “hidden” origins of Jacobinism, and a sinister plot by Freemasons and Illuminati to overthrow the established governments and religions of Europe and America. Thus would Federalist political verse morph into a version of the very rhetoric that its authors had once ridiculed as irrational and absurd.

Chapter 6

h Mirror Images O

nly days before popular voting began in the 1796 presidential election, the French minister to the United States, Pierre Adet, set in motion a series of events that would not only dominate John Adams’s presidency but shape the development of American political poetry as well. In an announcement submitted to the Philadelphia Aurora, Adet made public a new policy regarding France’s treatment of American cargo vessels: any ship carrying British cargo (which, thanks in part to the Jay Treaty, included countless American ships) would be considered an enemy vessel and thus subject to seizure by French privateers. In issuing this decree, France initiated what would come to be called the quasi-​­war of 1797–1798, during which hundreds of American ships were captured, forcing the newly elected president to deal with an acute foreign policy challenge that had awkward domestic implications. As Gordon Wood has remarked, there was something eerily similar between the situation Adams faced with regard to France in 1797 and the one faced by Washington with regard to Britain in 1794.1 Equally similar was the fact that, as in 1794, the events surrounding Adams’s diplomatic strategy were imbued with intense political controversy. This time, however, the political conflict appeared as a mirror image of the Jay Treaty controversy, with Federalists clamoring for war against France and Republicans calling for cooler heads and a spirit of compromise. It is in the context of this political mirror image that Federalist verse from the late 1790s would in a several respects morph into a mirror image of Republican verse from earlier in the decade. Federalists blamed their “war fever” on French belligerence, first in initiating the policy of seizing American ships and then in the French government’s

Mirror Images   207 unwelcoming reception of the diplomats Adams had appointed to attempt negotiate a new treaty—​­which, as was revealed in the infamous XYZ dispatches, involved a demand for bribes as a condition of negotiation. Such aggression, the war hawks argued, called for an equally aggressive response, which could only be achieved by strengthening the navy and reconstituting the army. For Republicans who had a few years earlier called for a similarly aggressive response to Britain, on the other hand, the crucial differences between the conflicts—​­or more particularly, the respective opponents—​­called for a more patient approach. After all, the United States and France were bound by a common political destiny to hasten the spread of liberty and the rights of man throughout the world. And indeed, France in 1797 appeared as likely as ever to accomplish such global aspirations, not least because of the military exploits of the young lieutenant general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was at that very moment engaged in his conquest of Italy, ostensibly liberating the masses from the twin tyrannies of imperial Austria and Catholic Rome. Bonaparte’s campaign loomed large for American partisans during the quasi-​­war precisely because it had the potential to confirm either of the grand historical narratives called upon to justify support of, or opposition to, the French Revolution as a whole. For those who had hailed the Revolution as an overthrow of the despots and priests who had long conspired to subjugate the masses, the conquest of Papal Rome appeared as a symbolic blow to the system of superstition used to blind the people to their true condition. At the same time, Bonaparte’s conquest also provided the foundation for an opposing interpretation in which the overthrow of the ancien régime figured merely as an act of replacing one form of tyranny with another—​­whether such tyranny appeared in the guise of Robespierre, the five-​­person Directory (which assumed power in 1795), or Napoleon himself. The “liberation” of Rome appeared in this narrative as the overthrow of an older, obvious form of superstition by a newer, less recognizable one that based its own system of mystification, paradoxically, on the language of liberty, equality, and the rights of man. This latter narrative explains the otherwise surprising resemblance between Federalist political poetry in the last years of the 1790s and the pro-​ ­Revolutionary verse of 1791–1793. Led by members of both generations of the Connecticut Wits, Federalist poets attacked the French Republic with a logic and fervor remarkably similar to that which poets like Barlow and Freneau had employed against the “conspiracy of kings.” As if in deferred satiric retort to Enlightenment attacks upon priestcraft and superstition, moreover,

208   Chapter 6 Federalists unmasked the Revolution’s own mode of mass ideological mobilization as religious or superstitious in its own right. And drawing on a similar indignation that arose from contemplating the violent consequences of this new form of ideological delusion, they followed precisely the logic of violence that had animated poets from the early years of the Revolution, envisioning and identifying with a similarly ferocious backlash against radical French republicans abroad and the seditious Americans who cheered them on. Yet beyond this specific development within Federalist verse, the late 1790s would witness the emergence of another type of literary mirroring as well, as an unprecedented number of poems and forms came to mirror poems and forms published by the opposing side. Owing largely to the proliferation of established partisan newspapers, each featuring regular poetic submissions in support of their preferred leaders and policies, poetic warfare reached its apex of cultural ubiquity in the last years of the decade. Scarcely was an issue or controversy deemed too insignificant to invite a corresponding tit for tat between rival poets, and scarcely did a specific genre or literary vogue arise on one side that did not also spawn a countergenre or countervogue from the opposing side. Yet this environment of consistent literary mimicry and retaliation would pose a problem of its own—​­indeed, a more general and pronounced version of the problem we encountered in Chapter 5 surrounding the struggle among the rival American imitators of Peter Pindar. That is, if every distinct Federalist poetic form could be answered in an equal but politically opposite Republican form, and vice versa, then neither form could lay claim to represent the true literary expression of the side of the people in some grand historical struggle. Thus divorced from the ideology of form that had once lent weight to poetry’s claim as a means of intervening in history, political verse would come to be regarded by an emerging generation of poets as merely political, in the dwindled sense of ceremonially advocating for one candidate or faction over another.

The Jacobin Conspiracy and the Logic of Federalist Retribution In May 1797, President John Adams addressed Congress to deal with the diplomatic impasse with France that had come to a head weeks before, when the Directory refused to receive the American ambassador, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Expressing their displeasure over the Jay Treaty, the French declared that they would begin treating American ships doing business in British ports

Mirror Images   209 as enemy vessels, a policy that threatened, in particular, the United States’ considerable West Indian trade. In his response, Adams revealed his willingness to prepare for armed conflict, urging the Congress to establish a permanent navy and a provisional army. Not surprisingly, his recommendations were met with skepticism or outright resistance by Republicans in Congress and in the press. In the first place, Republicans (no less than Federalists) viewed American diplomacy in the triangular context of the ongoing Franco-​ B ­ ritish war, such that any antagonism ­toward France, even that which was couched in terms of national defense, was perceived as originating from a pro-​­British bias. There also remained, even amid such tensions, an air of inevitability and rectitude about France’s national mission of spreading republican ideals throughout the European continent and beyond. This was the argument advanced by Freneau in his 1797 work “On the Proposed American Negotiation with the French Republic.” Whether the current administration chooses to negotiate a closer relationship with France, he writes, this does not alter the reality that “the world” is “Fatigu’d with long OPPRESSION’s reign” and ripe to “break its chain.” The French Revolution has offered in its place “A system godlike, great, and new, / That from enlighten’d reason springs / And bodes a better course of things.” America must now decide whether to join in this historical progress or to ignore its call, but if they choose the latter, they risk compromising the very meaning of their own Revolution: “If not the cause of France we aid, / O never may the words be said, / That we, to royal factions prone, / MADE NOT THE CAUSE OF MAN OUR OWN.”2 The great emblem of French Revolutionary progress in 1796–1797 was Napoleon Bonaparte as portrayed in numerous celebrations of his campaigns through Italy and Austria. Not only did his martial prowess promise a decisive victory over the allied monarchies with which France was at war, but more important, such victories allowed him to be regarded as a champion of liberty and the rights of man. “ILLUSTRIOUS BUONAPARTE! thy name / Shall stand immortal on the list of fame!” sang the speaker of one of a number of American tributes to the young general: “Republicans rejoice / And raise your cheerful voice, / For FREEDOM reigns! / See glorious Liberty / Setting all Nations free, / ‘Melting their chains.’ ” That his Italian campaign included the liberation of the Papal States provided an additional layer of symbolism for Republican poets, signaling a victory of reason over Catholic superstition in addition to that of republicanism over monarchy. As Freneau muses in his poem “On the Progress of the French Armies in Italy,” Bonaparte’s “heroic bands” have

210   Chapter 6 captured the land where Nero reigned, where sacrifices were once offered to imaginary deities, and where “The mitred Pontiff aw’d Religion’s stage.” More than the passing of territory from one power to another, the Italian conquest represented a large-​­scale awakening from ideological slumber, leaving the newly liberated Italians in a state of wonder and exultation: All, all must sink before the invading dart Or reasoning, conquering, pitying BUONAPARTE, Who led by fate to Rome’s disastrous walls Loud, and more loud, for his last triumph calls; While superstition—​­dull, deluding hag—​­ Looks up—​­and bows to the tri-​­colour’d flag, And Nations, wakening, round the standard throng, Exult, and wonder why they slept so long.3 This same prospect, however, inspired the opposite reaction from another prominent poet, the first-​­generation Connecticut Wit Timothy Dwight. Having largely given up writing poetry in the mid-​­1790s to concentrate on his duties as president of Yale, the author of The Conquest of Canaan and Greenfield Hill nonetheless found time to respond to the news out of Europe with a poetic “fragment” of nearly four hundred lines, “An Extract from The Retrospect.” Written largely from the point of view of a benevolent “Spirit” who addresses the speaker as he surveys the state of Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, the poem opens with a very different account of the Italian campaign, one focusing not on Bonaparte but on an ordinary Italian shepherd whose life is suddenly transformed by the arrival of the French Army. More specifically, the poem centers on what Dwight treats as the central problem posed by the success of the conquest: namely, that of explaining how this pastoral figure could suddenly be transformed into a furious supporter of a political cause forced upon him by an invading general. The answer to this question, Dwight suggests, is found in what we have since come to call ideology: From sleep and death he wakes to life unknown, And glows with thoughts, and wishes, not his own; Through the rous’d nerves he feels the clarion thrill, His bosom throbs, his veigns [sic] with horror chill,

Mirror Images   211 From sparkling flames his phrenzied eye-​­balls roll, And Freedom’s mania races through this soul. Aghast, he sees a newborn Caesar rise, And gasp at all beneath Italian skies. In the immediate context of the debate over Bonaparte’s rise and significance, Dwight’s reading of the episode follows directly from the Enlightenment narrative of awakening from the stupor of superstition, as his own Italian peasant is a constituent of Freneau’s “wakening . . . ​throng.” Yet rather than awakening into a state of enlightened consciousness, this figure has merely exchanged one form of ideological “sleep” for another: the “thoughts, and wishes,” he experiences are no more “his own” than those of his earlier state. At the same time, insofar as these new thoughts and wishes appear as glimpses of truth, they provide the critical vantage point from which to recognize his earlier state of false consciousness. And this, in turn, explains what Dwight describes as “Freedom’s mania,” as this moment of recognition fills the man with such shame and resentment ­toward the sources of his former state of delusion that he is now suddenly willing to kill or die for what amounts to the authoritarian ambitions of a “newborn Caesar”: “The shame, he felt, the general bosom fires; / His rage, the rage of all the world inspires; / Round the portentous chief the millions throng, / And blood, and death, and ravage, swell the song.”4 Such a detailed account of the process by which Revolutionary fervor could itself constitute a form of ideological enthrallment served as a powerful literary retort not simply to the various encomia on Napoleon’s exploits but also to the entire body of pro-​­Revolutionary verse going back to Barlow’s Conspiracy of Kings and Freneau’s “Lines occasioned by reading Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man.” For Dwight’s counternarrative—​­in which a revolutionary awakens from one form of superstition into the “dreams” of another—​­provided a language to critique France’s collective conversion to secularism in the early years of the Revolution as a descent into a form of superstition that paradoxically suppresses its underlying religious aspects. Despite the insistence of Revolutionary leaders like Robespierre that the Revolution was founded on the principle of Reason, this same principle had taken a very different aspect when given institutional form in the decrees of the National Convention: replacing the sabbatical week with the secular “decade” of the Republican calendar, renaming Notre Dame as the Temple of Reason, placing signs at the gates of cemeteries proclaiming that death is an “eternal sleep.” Such acts as these,

212   Chapter 6 “The Retrospect” argues, constitute not secularization as such but mass conversion to a form of devotion that, on the one hand, takes the form of secularization but, on the other, retains the strict rituals and icons that define a belief system as religious: See thrice ten millions, burning to be free, Bow to a cap, and fall before a tree; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . With Egypt, bend before a calf, or cat, Jesus dethrone, and deify [M]arat; To heaven’s own altar the fouls strumpet raise, And roar in frantic hymns her tainted praise.5 In the context of America’s continued support for Revolutionary France, even in the age of Bonaparte, the significance of Dwight’s analysis of Revolutionary fervor as a superstition or ideology was that it treated Jacobinism as a transnational phenomenon that posed as great a danger to America as to France. Dwight gets at this threat later in “The Retrospect” when the spirit turns from the state of Europe to describe a similar superstition taking hold in the United States in the form of an emerging devotion to liberty as an ­abstraction—​­a pining, he states, for “some unknown freedom . . . ​/ That dwells in dreams, or vibrates in a name.” When coupled with a newly awakened rage against the status quo, this devotion threatens the very existence of the government: “Here Gallia’s self-​­inspir’d Vesuvian flame / Burns furious in ten thousand sons of shame; / Phrenzy, destruction’s bosom in his hand, / Stands pois’d to sweep each blessing from the land.” Thus the poem concludes with the speaker expressing his overwhelming anxiety over the future of the republic, leaving him powerless except to offer a prayer that God may intervene where human wisdom has failed: “Extend thy hand, the maddening millions save; / And snatch a world from an untimely grave!”6 Though “The Retrospect” remained unpublished until 1801, and thus did not participate directly in the poetry wars of 1797–1798, its call for a demystification of French Revolutionary ideology prefigured a larger development within Federalist verse, particularly after the quasi-​­war crisis erupted. This change is most immediately evident in the appearance of poems projecting a similarly grand historical and geographical scope: just as the guiding spirit of “The Retrospect” surveys the social and political conditions in Europe and

Mirror Images   213 America before delivering his monitory verdict, a significant number of Federalist poems from the late 1790s are structured around similar global retrospectives. Most often, such poems appeared in the form of New Year’s carrier’s addresses, which by 1798 had displaced parody and mock epic to become the most prominent Federalist satiric form. Thus, for instance, Lemuel Hopkins began producing his annual “Guillotina” series for the Connecticut Courant (which ran from 1797 to 1799) while also collaborating with Richard Alsop and Theodore Dwight on The Political Green-​­House, For the Year 1798, which, at nearly six-​­hundred lines, enlarged the scale of the New Year’s retrospective far beyond its early broadside origins. Federalist New Year’s verse of the late 1790s also followed “An Extract from The Retrospect” by building onto its counternarrative of the French Revolution, presenting it as a series of conscious ideological manipulations of the people by an ever-​­shifting succession of beneficiary bosses, from Robespierre to the Directory to Napoleon. Hopkins’s “Guillotina” from January 1798 tears away the abstract mythology of progress and liberty to recount the history of the Revolution as a sequence of needlessly violent incidents—​­“The ball was op’d with Regicide, / Next hills and plains with blood were dy’d”—​ ­that, far from ushering in an era of peace and freedom, has brought only tyranny and imperial conquest. Having deposed and executed the so-​­called tyrant Louis XVI, the French have replaced him with “five kings of tyrant birth” in the Directory, and in sending Bonaparte on his putative campaign of liberation, they have adopted the heavy-​­handed tactics of ancient imperial powers, coercing less-​­powerful neighboring states to accept a charade of freedom: “To liberty the jig was play’d, / That shy coquette, that new OLD MAID; / The small dependent states around, / Must feign enchantment at the sound, / And douse their pelf to bid its course, / Or be, still worse, made free by force.” Still, Hopkins goes on to say, the proponents of the Revolution continue to conceive of their movement in millennialist terms, as the fulfillment of utopian predictions by Enlightenment philosophers: “Thus too, the ‘Age of Reason’s’ ray, / Beams on bless’d France the perfect day; / Foretold by Godwin, Paine, and others, / A list that ends with Richard Brothers.” As is hinted at in the now-​­obscure reference at the end of this passage—​­to Richard Brothers, a would-​­be prophet who called himself the “prince of the Hebrews”—​­such millennial visions only confirmed the superstition underlying Enlightenment progressivism in the 1790s.7 At the same time, the portrayal of French Revolutionary ideology as

214   Chapter 6 superstition or delusion raised the question of how such false ideas came to be disseminated, and by whom. Once again, mirroring the logic of Barlow and Freneau from earlier in the decade, Federalist poets answered these questions by invoking an account of an elaborate conspiracy, hidden from plain sight but ultimately responsible for bringing about a series of world-​­historical developments. This was, of course, the conspiracy of the so-​­called Bavarian Illuminati, a largely imaginary secret society whose purported activities were recounted in several highly influential exposés that appeared in America during the war crisis of 1798 (most notably, John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies). According to Robison, whose “findings” were touted by several prominent American religious figures (including Timothy Dwight), the society of the Illuminati had been formed in the 1770s for the purpose of spreading Enlightenment ideas, most often by infiltrating other groups, such as the Freemasons, and converting their members to their politically radical and religiously skeptical ideas. Their crowning achievement, according to Robison and others, was setting in motion the French Revolution by joining with the Jacobin clubs and guiding their revolutionary activities. Yet this was only the beginning of an even greater plot: to overthrow all of the governments of Europe and America and remake them in the image of the Directory.8 With its sweeping assertions of momentous events masterminded by unseen hands, the theory of the Illuminati has understandably come to be viewed as an early example of a “paranoid style in American politics.” Yet for reasons having to do with the specific circumstances of 1798, the theory gained wide popularity in Federalist circles. The most explosive context for its dissemination was the publication of the XYZ dispatches, which recounted the Directory’s refusal to receive the American envoys sent to negotiate a Franco-​­American treaty, and, more confrontationally, the Directory’s demand for payment as a condition for preventing war. More than any event, the XYZ affair was responsible for the war fever that arose in the summer of 1798 (which, as we shall see, inspired countless bellicose poems and songs). Yet for the Connecticut Wits in particular, the XYZ affair was significant because it offered proof of the “true” motives of Revolutionary leaders. As they put it in The Political Green-​­House, the American envoys bore the insults of “Autun, and the five-​­head Beast, / And half the Alphabet at least” for months before they saw fit to make the scandal known to Congress. Yet when the details of

Mirror Images   215 scandal were finally made public, “The budget op’d, in Congress, show’d / The whole contrivance of the brood, / And that their heads were bent on brewing / Subjection, infamy, and ruin.9 Such an exposé of the Directory’s true motives, in turn, called for an explanation as to how the French Revolutionaries had been able to generate a successful popular revolt in the first place, and here the Illuminati theory provided an explanation by way of a variation on the “conspiracy of kings” motif. The Revolution was brought about by elites who colluded to exploit the masses for their selfish ends, in this case by establishing a sham republic in which the rhetoric of liberty and rights papered over the authoritarian ambitions of its leaders. This is the logic by which the authors of The Political Green-​­House not only treat the Illuminati theory as historical fact but then imagine, in frantic detail, various yet-​­unrealized schemes of the Illuminati in other countries, including America: Behold! this dark mysterious Band, In myriads spread thro’ every land, Steal slily to the posts of state, And wield unseen the Nation’s fate! Where Virtue builds her still retreats, Where learning holds her sacred seats, Behold! array’d in semblance fair, The fell Illuminatus there!10 Such passages as this one reveal the level of political paranoia that dominated the period of the quasi-​­war, which was elsewhere given voice by prominent Federalists in numerous sermons and public addresses. Yet in the specific context of the development of American political poetry, it also marks the endpoint in a decade-​­long evolution of Federalist verse. This change is most starkly evident in the satiric careers of the second-​­generation Connecticut Wits—​­Alsop, Hopkins, and Theodore Dwight—​­and more particularly in the difference in content and tone between “The Echo” and The Political Green-​ ­House. Whereas the former ridiculed the opposition Republicans as fanatical in their appeals to a hidden aristocratic plot, and did so from a position of intellectual confidence, the latter anxiously embraces an equally conspiratorial logic in the form of a plot to undermine the republic by “a Jacobinic band, / Who, their united force employ, / Its richest blessings to destroy.” 11

216   Chapter 6 Just as the pro-​­Revolutionary poetry of Barlow and Freneau followed a logic in which the indignation of the poet over the conspiracy of kings led him to call for retribution, The Political Green-​­House follows its exposé of a Jacobin conspiracy with a similar threat of punishment: “let those who dare / E’en wish this peaceful land to share, / Change their dark purpose ere too late, / Or else prepare to meet their fate.” Yet unlike the poems of Barlow and Freneau, which imagined such retribution in the form of revolutionary violence itself, The Political Green-​­House imagines such righteous vengeance as an arm of the state—​­more precisely, in the form of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which had recently been passed by Congress. Granting the federal government power to designate and punish alien enemies and to jail newspaper editors for “defaming” public officials, these laws are remembered today as a breach of constitutional rights as well as a disastrous political miscalculation (leading to one of the first major challenges to federal authority, the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions). Yet to encounter the Alien and Sedition Acts as they appear in Federalist verse from 1798 is to confront a wholly different perspective on such impositions of government power, as not merely justifiable but worthy of glorification. Indeed, as if in direct response to such poems as “The Republican Genius of Europe”—​­which, we may recall, imagined an apocalyptic spirit traversing from country to country, laying tyrants low—​­The Political Green-​­House personifies the Alien and Sedition Acts as two “dismal forms” that “cloud the Jacobinic sky,” bringing with them “awful Justice” and “Law’s loud thunders.” Calling to mind divine wrath more than legal justice, such imagery helps to explain the evolution of Federalist verse over the course of 1790s, from decrying revolutionary violence to celebrating the capacity of the Alien and Sedition Acts to strike terror in the hearts of enemies both foreign and domestic: “Each factious alien shrinks with dread, / And hides his hemp-​ ­devoted head; / While Slander’s foul seditious crew, / With gnashing teeth retire from view.”12 By embracing both a mirror image of the conspiracy discourse they had once ridiculed and a mirror image of the logic of violent retribution that had animated so many tributes to the French Revolution, the Connecticut Wits ended up aligning themselves with the very authoritarianism they elsewhere denounced in their satires of Robespierre and the Directory. Their willingness to believe the worst about the motives of their political opponents—​ ­whom they represented no longer as deluded zealots but as hidden agents of a global Jacobin plot—​­made them also willing to call upon whatever means

Mirror Images   217 they deemed necessary to deal with such a threat. At the same time, as we shall see in the following section, the Federalists’ defense of the Alien and Sedition Acts constituted only one aspect of an emerging fascination with national power and martial prowess. The war fever of 1798 would also create the conditions for a new literary and musical vogue—​­the patriotic war hymn—​­as poets and songwriters representing both parties would engage in a series of back-​­and-​­forth struggles over the heroism and physical fortitude of their respective political leaders.

War Hymns, Jacobin Odes, and the Poetical-​­Political Mirror Among the ways in which the presidency of John Adams was transformed by the quasi-​­war, none was more dramatic than his apparent surge in popularity during the summer and fall of 1798. Following the publication of the XYZ dispatches, Elkins and McKitrick report, patriotic addresses and messages of support “pour[ed] on him from everywhere,” and the new war president found himself “widely popular for the first and only time in his life.” Not least among these tributes were dozens of poems or, more often, songs, which appeared with a sudden and remarkable frequency, as if in recompense for the years when Vice President Adams had been ridiculed as “Pomposo” and censured for harboring a “dangerous” inclination ­toward monarchy. Now Adams was celebrated as America’s “pride” and portrayed as a valiant commander in chief who would, once and for all, “bruise the head of France.” The author most responsible for this literary and musical vogue was Robert Treat Paine Jr., son of one of Adams’s oldest colleagues in the law and the Continental Congress, and the author of the archetypal patriotic hymn “Adams and Liberty.” Reprinted in newspapers from Maine to Georgia as well as in several separate broadside editions, it was the most popular song in America during the summer of 1798, and its popularity, in turn, opened the way for other patriotic hymns and presidential tributes with such obviously derivative titles as “Adams Forever” and “Adams and Washington.”13 “Adams and Liberty” was not the first song to pay tribute to Adams, nor was it the first to urge Americans to prepare for war against France. Yet its influence arose from the way it crystallized, in a single, accessible hymn, several distinct elements crucial to the public mood in 1798. Foremost among these was the sense of resentment over France’s treatment of Americans, both in the ongoing raids on American ships and in the treatment of the diplomats

218   Chapter 6 in the XYZ affair. Both episodes, not surprisingly, figure prominently in “Adams and Liberty,” which devotes one stanza to the threat of pirates who “incense the legitimate powers of the ocean” and insists in another that Americans will never sell their “SOV’REIGNTY, JUSTICE or FAME” to achieve an ignoble peace. More important, the song as a whole reads as if it is designed to give vent to popular outrage, such as when the speaker hyperbolically proclaims that Americans will sooner fell every tree from their forests to build warships than allow their shores to be invaded: “Our mountains are crowned with imperial Oak; / Whose roots, like our Liberties, ages have nourished; / But long ere our nation submits to the yoke, / Not a tree shall be left on the field where it flourished.” While earlier tributes to Adams had called for Americans to stand on guard should war become necessary, Paine’s song added concreteness and intensity to the notion, which only escalated in later war hymns. Thus Paine’s follow-​­up from 1799, “To Arms, Columbia!” includes an even more furious call to avenge France’s wrongs, and seems to revel in gory depictions of naval warfare: “Revenge! Revenge! The flag’s unfurl’d! / Let Freedom’s cannon wake the world, / And Ocean gorge on pirates slain.”14 In addition to referencing the possibility of war, “Adams and Liberty” called for national unity amid crisis by appealing to familiar patriotic and nostalgic tropes. In the first place, the song’s refrain alludes to one of the most celebrated patriotic hymns of the eighteenth century, James Thomson’s “Rule Britannia”—​­“And ne’er may the sons of Columbia be slaves, / While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves”—​­which serves to redirect the emotional power of the original from Britain to America. More obviously, “Adams and Liberty” appeals to patriotism through its repeated references to the glories of the American Revolution, such as in the opening stanza’s address to the members of the Revolutionary generation: “Ye sons of Columbia, who bravely have fought, / For those rights, which unstain’d from your Sires had descended, / May you long taste the blessings your valour has brought, / And your sons reap the soil which their fathers defended.”15 Beyond serving as a call to Paine’s own generation to live up to the heroism of their fathers, such references invited the song’s audience to situate itself in a community of memory linked inexorably to the Revolution. Perhaps the most surprising way in which “Adams and Liberty” encouraged loyalty to President Adams was by linking him to the glory of his predecessor, George Washington—​­ not as president, importantly, but as the commander of the Continental Army. Indeed, Paine’s song marked an impor-

Mirror Images   219 tant departure from the Washington encomia from earlier in the decade, which had emphasized his role as the statesman who held the nation together amid division before selflessly relinquishing power and returning to private life. Yet during the war fever of 1798, Washington had reluctantly agreed to come out of retirement to command the New Army that had recently been commissioned, setting the stage for Washington’s reappearance in “Adams and Liberty” as a military hero who is almost single-​­handedly capable of defending the nation against enemy attacks: “Should the TEMPEST OF WAR overshadow our land, / Its bolts could ne’er rend FREEDOM’s temple asunder;/ For unmoved, at its portal, would WASHINGTON stand, / And repulse, with his BREAST, the assaults of the THUNDER!” Though the New Army would never materialize, and Washington would himself die before the end of Adams’s presidency, Paine’s invocation to the retired hero opened the way for countless subsequent literary celebrations, throughout 1798 and 1799, of the hero’s return.16 As political propaganda, the strategic brilliance of “Adams and Liberty” lay in its capacity to harness the symbolic power of Washington’s heroism and transfer it to his successor through the metaphoric conduit of the presidency. This was no mean feat, not merely because Adams had never conjured up images of heroism on his own but also because whoever occupied the office after Washington was fated to pale in comparison. Yet the song answers this challenge with a series of bold assertions, beginning with the titular identification of Adams with liberty and concluding with a stanza comparing the new commander in chief (who had himself never served in any military capacity) to Sparta’s vaunted King Leonidas, who successfully defended Greece against the invading Persians at Thermopylae: “Then unite, heart and hand, / Like Leonidas’ band, / And swear to the GOD of the ocean and land;/ That ne’er shall the sons of COLUMBIA be slaves, / While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves.”17 The other critical strategic move of “Adams and Liberty” was to place the song’s numerous appeals to national unity into what was essentially a partisan political song. For, no less than the “Guillotina” poems or The Political Green-​ ­House, “Adams and Liberty” presupposes the existence of a dangerous faction threatening America from within even as it arms itself against an external threat posed by France. Recounting the short history of the republic, Paine writes: “The fame of our arms, of our laws the mild sway, / Had justly ennobled our nation in story, / ’Till the dark clouds of Faction obscured our young day, / And

220   Chapter 6 enveloped the sun of American glory.” This is the standard Federalist explanation of the rise of political discord in the 1790s, but as the stanza moves ­toward its emphatic refrain, the tone becomes noticeably more conspiratorial, directing its defiance not against France but against the “traitors” who had sold out their country: “But let TRAITORS be told, / Who their Country have sold, / And bartered their God for his image in gold—​­ / That ne’er will the sons of Columbia be slaves, / While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves.” When placed alongside the song’s more obvious appeals to patriotism and nostalgia, such warnings affirm the Federalists’ suspicions ­toward their political opponents while couching such suspicions in terms of patriotism rather than partisanship. And as was the case with other patriotic songs we have encountered, the identification of patriotism and Federalism was reinforced by the experience of joining with others in singing “Adams and Liberty,” as many Americans did, according to newspaper accounts from the time.18 The ideological power of joining in a chorus of “Adams and Liberty” is evidenced, in turn, by the many imitations of its lyric and theme (as in the song “Adams and Washington”) as well as of its music (as in “Song. Tune—​ ­Adams and Liberty”). Indeed, the tune, more commonly known as “Anacreon in Heaven,” would be used in numerous subsequent patriotic songs, including, of course, Francis Scott Key’s “Star-​­Spangled Banner.” The popularity of the broader “Adams and Liberty” vogue posed a significant political challenge for Republicans, prompting several poets to respond by suggesting that the entire war fever, including its many songs, was a mere contrivance by partisan editors and poets to prop up a president who was utterly devoid of heroic qualities. As Freneau would ask rhetorically in a poem entitled “The American War Hawk,” “What next will villainy contrive / To bid the days of war arrive? / Is there no chance to pick a quarrel / And crown Pomposo’s brows with laurel?”19 Yet despite such withering blows, poems calling into question the run-​­up to war in 1798 were largely drowned out by the number and repetition of patriot hymns and odes, each reinforcing the imperative that Americans unite against a belligerent external threat, and more subtly suggesting that those who downplayed the threat may themselves have been harboring disloyal sentiments. Yet while Republican poets could not effectively nullify the ideological power of “Adams and Liberty” and its successor hymns, a few songwriters discovered that their effect might be diluted through imitation. For if the signature rhetorical move of Paine’s hymn was to invent a formula in which

Mirror Images   221 the heroism of Washington could be transferred to Adams, might not the same symbolic transference be applied to other public figures, even those representing the opposing party? To be sure, this strategy proved most effective after the abatement of the war fever of 1798–1799, when questions of the republic’s future centered once again on an election rather than a war. This is the context in which those supporting Adams’s principal opponent in 1800 would seek to whip up enthusiasm for their candidate by singing a popular song of their own, aptly entitled “Jefferson and Liberty.” Most remarkable about this song is that it recasts Jefferson in similar terms as its precursor—​­as America’s true guardian against foreign enemies, despite the lies being spread by his domestic enemies: “Calumny and falsehood in vain raise their voice, / To blast our Vice-​­President’s fair reputation; / But JEFFERSON still is America’s choice, / And he will her liberties guard from invasion.”20 “Jefferson and Liberty” follows a simple substitutional strategy of harnessing the ideology of form implicit in “Adams and Liberty” and projecting it onto Jefferson. Yet importantly, this song also spawned its own imitations, which even more ingeniously reclaimed the ideal of liberty for the Republican side. In another song entitled “Jefferson and Liberty,” composed for the new president’s inauguration, the speaker credits Jefferson with ending the “reign of Terror” brought on by the Alien and Sedition Acts: “THE gloomy night before us flies: / The reign of Terror now is o’er, / Its Gags, Inquisitors and Spies, / Its hordes of harpies are no more.” Such revisions as this one tapped into the original power of “Adams and Liberty” while suggesting that it was Adams himself who had shamefully relinquished that song’s central identification with “liberty.” Beyond their capacity to redefine the terms of political debate, Republican imitations of “Adams of Liberty” also worked to ideologically dilute the form as a whole, transforming the patriotic hymn—​­which, in its original guise, communicated a sense of historical urgency—​­into little more than a campaign jingle, as evident in such titles as “Condit and Liberty” and “Smith and Liberty,” which appeared amid the congressional elections of 1798.21 Importantly, this same strategy of dilution was also used to diminish the ideological force of a genre of verse that leveled a powerful satiric attack against the Federalists during the war fever of 1798; this was the mock fast-​­day psalm, which took aim at New England clergymen in particular for using their religious authority to drum up support for declaring war against France. As we have seen, Federalists had long articulated their anti-​­French Revolutionary

222   Chapter 6 sentiment in religious terms, and the Illuminati scare was inflamed in large part in sermons by prominent clergymen like Timothy Dwight. Yet when President Adams issued a proclamation calling for “a Day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer”—​­urging Americans to pray “that our Country be protected from all the dangers that threaten it” and “that the American People may be united” in response—​­Republican poets responded by parodying what they viewed as using Christianity as a form of political propaganda. Thus, for instance, “Psalm for the Federal Fast,” which appeared in numerous papers in the weeks leading up to the appointed day, unmasked the entire event as a contrivance of the Federalist Party: YE Federal States combine,

In solemn fast and Prayer; And urge the powers divine To drive us into war; With voices strong Each Federalist On pension list Begin the song.22 Representing the public fast as an appalling scheme to use prayer as a way “To drive us into war,” the song as a whole reads like a catalogue of the political interest groups accused of devising such a nakedly propagandistic act. Subsequent stanzas, for instance, focus on the New England clergy, which the poet accuses of abandoning religion for politics, as well as politicians like Timothy Pickering and Oliver Wolcott, the two members of Adams’s cabinet widely believed to be most enamored of Great Britain. Importantly, there is also a stanza dedicated to the role of the Hartford Wits, which the speaker portrays as the “seed” or offspring of Timothy Dwight (identified by his authorship of The Conquest of Canaan) and derides for their willingness to risk soldiers’ lives to prop up Adams’s reputation: “Let Hartford wits proceed / To sing John Adams’ praise, / Canaan’s poets seed / Shall high his honours raise.” The common motif in this and in other mock psalms is that there is nothing so shameless as contriving a solemn occasion, posing as a pious, concerned leader, and then using that occasion for a nakedly partisan purpose. Or, as the parodied speaker of another mock “prayer” admits, for a leader to declare a day of fasting over a national crisis is the ultimate political ploy:

Mirror Images   223 Dear Lord, when’ere [sic] we danger fear, We then can call a day of pray’r; And this will make the world believe, That for our country’s cause we grieve—​­ By this we’ll make our schemes compleat, And on the world impose a cheat.23 Yet in the same way that Republican authors responded to the war hymn vogue by producing mirror images of Paine’s “Adams and Liberty,” Federalist poets responded to the “Federal Fast” prototype with a series of similarly imitative retorts. The most famous of these, “The Jacobin’s Psalm, For Fast Day,” simply mimics the form of the “Federal Fast” parodies while substituting a “Jacobin” speaker who prays for the French Republic while openly acknowledging his true diabolical motives: “Let our ignoble race, / A patriotic few / When Satan’s arms embrace, / Loud shout the cry and hue. / For France, for France, / We’ll boldly bawl, / And one and all, / We’ll join the dance.” Neither this specific retort nor the retorts of copycat poems that followed were especially clever, even by the standards of political tit-​­for-​­tat exchanges, yet their appearance alone was enough to weaken the force of the more incisive Republican satire against the Federalist clergy. Drawing on the argument that French Revolutionary ideology constituted a form of religious devotion, such poems responded by charging that the French and American Republicans were equally guilty of mixing politics and religion. Thus, in the case of the two most popular literary vogues of 1798, the creation of mirror images of their formal and thematic elements served to dissociate both genres from the ideological content embedded in their respective forms.24 Viewed in a transnational context, moreover, the exchange of Federalist and “Jacobin” fast-​­day psalms brings to light another dimension of literary-​ ­political mirroring that characterized the war crisis of 1798–1799. This is the extent to which the struggle between partisan poets in the United States reflected a nearly identical struggle taking place in Britain, with William Gifford and the members of the London Anti-​­Jacobin group aligned with American Federalists and Liberal, proto-​­Romantic poets like Robert Southey penning anti-​­Tory satires similar to those of American Republicans. This literary resemblance, of course, reflected a corresponding resemblance in political context: Britain’s Tory government was in its sixth year of war with France, and Napoleon’s Armée d’Angleterre was assembled across the English Channel,

224   Chapter 6 poised to invade England; as in America, moreover, Britons were split between Liberals sympathetic to the French Revolution and a Tory party that had recently passed a series of sedition laws to root out a perceived threat posed by such sympathizers. Amid this political environment, the Anti-​­Jacobin magazine published patriotic odes vowing to protect Britain’s shores against impending invasion—​­“Whilst every Briton’s song shall be, / ‘O give us Death—​­or Victory’ ”—​­and parodies of their Liberal opponents’ “psalms” to France and Anarchy: “GODDESS, whose dire terrific power / Spreads from thy loved Gallia’s plains / Where’er her blood-​­ stain’d ensigns lower, / much-​­ Where­e’er fell Rapine stalks, or barb’rous Discord reigns!” And in this same environment, Southey responded to the administration’s call for a national fast day with a scriptural ode that unmasked the occasion as a sacrilegious encouragement to pray for the destruction of one’s enemies: “Behold ye fast for strife, ye fast for war, / To smite with the strong arm of ambition. / Ye shall not fast like this, / To make your voice be heard.”25 This resemblance between the poetry wars of the American republic and the literary warfare waged in Britain by Southey’s radicals and the Anti-​ ­Jacobin group attests, once again, to the transnational dimension of political verse wars as a whole in the 1790s. In earlier chapters, we saw that the intensity of distrust between Federalists and Republicans had originated from each side’s tendency to view the other as an extension of one of the two warring European powers. Most remarkable about the last years of the decade is that poets were far less likely to disavow such international allegiances. Thus, for instance, in answer to the laudatory poems by Freneau and others, commemorating Bonaparte’s victories in Italy and Austria, Federalist poets rejoiced in the failure of the planned French invasion of Britain. Blurring the lines of national identity even further, Federalist newspapers reprinted laudatory odes to the Tory government, and at least one London poet composed a pro-​­British war song to the tune of “Adams and Liberty” (which was promptly reprinted in America).26 The same transnational dynamic helps to account for the brief American career of William Cobbett (better known by his literary persona, Peter Porcupine), publisher of the virulently pro-​­Federalist and pro-​­British Porcupine’s Gazette from 1797 to 1800. Though chiefly a prose polemicist, Cobbett was occasionally drawn to poetry, such as in the lengthy verse satire that advertised his national and political loyalties in the title: French Arrogance; or, “The Cat let out of the Bag;” A Political Dialogue between the Envoys of America, and

Mirror Images   225 X.Y.Z. and the Lady. Consisting of a one-​­sided dialogue between a haughty and combative “France” and an “America” that condemns both the XYZ affair and the French Republic as a whole, the poem is significant mainly for inspiring Matthew Carey’s mock-​­epic response The Porcupiniad, which accuses Cobbett of being a double agent for the British government, sent to America to breed discord and “Show how unfit the people are / T’ enjoy of government a share.”27 To be sure, the conspiratorial tone underlying both this exchange and that of the rival fast-​­day odes, insinuating that American partisans were secretly working for France or Britain, lent an air of historical momentousness to the partisan divide. Yet working against this was the reflexive tit-​­for-​­tat dynamic of the exchanges themselves, which suggested that the involvement of poets in political conflict had become largely ceremonial and obligatory. This is nowhere more evident than in the many poems and songs devoted to the 1798 brawl between two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Matthew Lyon of Vermont and Roger Griswold of Connecticut. The story of the incident instantly came to be seen as a microcosm of the intense nature of partisan warfare during Adams’s presidency: Lyon, an Irish immigrant and one-​­time indentured servant, had risen to prominence in Vermont as the publisher of the Republican Farmer’s Weekly, before being elected to Congress in 1797. He soon made a name for himself as a brash critic of the House’s rules of order, for which he was roundly attacked in the Federalist press. Though Lyon usually wore such censure as a badge of honor, he was particularly incensed by an article from Porcupine’s Gazette charging that, during the American Revolution, he had been court-​­martialed for desertion. When Griswold publicly brought up the episode, Lyon responded by spitting in his face; after attempting unsuccessfully to have Lyon expelled from the body, Griswold assaulted Lyon with a cane until the fight was broken up by their congressional colleagues.28 For the rest of the year, the incident was commemorated in poems and songs ranging from a broadside ballad sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” to a mock epic in five cantos. Accounts of the incident, not surprisingly, differed depending on the partisan leanings of the poet or balladeer, and the story was easily framed to according to the stereotypes of the respective parties. In Federalist verse, Lyon was an uncouth upstart, “rugged Mat, the Democrat,” whose first offense was assuming he belonged in a political body where “ ’Mongst gentlemen he happ’d to stray, / Where, ignorant what to say, or do,

226   Chapter 6 / His monkey tricks began to shew.” In this version of the story, Griswold’s attack was consistently described as a “caning,” a term that reinforced the social hierarchy separating the combatants. Yet for those who took Lyon’s side in the fracas, such social condescension was precisely the issue: Lyon was unashamed that “High Blood in his veins does not flow” and that “he did not proceed / From any high-​­bred sons of riches.” Indeed, this is what made him a “zealous stickler for the people’s cause,” refusing to be intimidated by the pomp of public office: “Firm and upright th’undaunted hero stood, / The scourge of tyrants on his native sod; / No custom sway’d him, and no frowns impress’d, / But truth and virtue fir’d his manly breast.”29 Accounts of the outcome of the fight diverged along party lines as well. In the first place, to be declared the winner of the fight seemed to symbolize the political ascendancy of the winning combatant’s party. Yet beyond this, the brawl called up competing claims of superior manhood. Supporters of Lyon portrayed him as a version of the emerging “common man” ideal that would ultimately take hold in the Democratic Party of Jackson, and they went to considerable lengths to insist that Lyon was ambushed, and that he would have gotten the better of Griswold had not the Federalist Speaker broken up the fight to protect the cowardly attacker from retaliation. For their part, Federalist wits insisted that Lyon’s bluster was a cover for his weakness, as evidenced in their endlessly repeating the story of Lyon’s court-​­martial, and particularly their false claim that the younger Lyon had been sentenced to wear a wooden sword as a symbol of his cowardice. Far from representing a new breed of antiaristocratic masculinity, the Lyon of Federalist poetry and song was a backcountry Falstaff whose bravado was aptly humbled by Griswold’s cane: “In Griswold’s face the vexed lion spat: / But Roger can’d him for his bold offense, / And Matthew has been quiet ever since.” Against the backdrop of frequent invocations to heroism and martial prowess during the summer of the war fever, moreover, Federalist poets seemed to delight in proving their willingness to respond to provocations with physical force.30 Had the poetry surrounding the Lyon-​­Griswold affair been limited to such exchanges as these, its dynamic would have replicated that of the other literary clashes of the time, with rival poets mirroring each other’s rhetorical strategies, but speaking mainly past each other to mutually exclusive audiences. Yet because the brawl also symbolized the extreme state to which partisan politics had devolved by 1798, the episode gave rise as well to a new literary-​­political development, one that contained crucial implications for the

Mirror Images   227 future of the poetry wars in general. For in addition to the poems and songs that cheered on the respective combatants, there appeared another poetic variation on the topic, which directed its satire t­ oward both sides and emphasized their shared blame in disgracing the dignity of the Congress. This is the point, for instance, of James Carey’s House of Wisdom in a Bustle, which mocks both combatants’ conduct equally and reserves its strongest criticism for the “House of Wisdom” as a whole for failing to expel both members for such a violation: “For so daring an insult, so vile a convulsion, / A member arose and mov’d for expulsion, / But alas! it fell thro,’ the motion was lost, / And C‑ng‑‑ss decreed they shou’d both keep their post.” A similar point is made in The Battle of the Wooden Sword, a drinking song that advises its audience to laugh at the absurdity of the episode, if only to avoid reflecting on the fact that the members of this distinguished body were being paid six dollars per diem to behave in such a way: “This cost U.S. if right I guess, / Twelve thousand dollars rino, / Which bye and bye will make us sigh, / Instead of laughing, I know.”31 The latter poem and song belonged to a new category of political verse satire, directed not at the threat posed by one party or political philosophy but at the danger of extreme partisanship itself to the health of the republic. Insofar as The Battle of the Wooden Sword and The House of Wisdom in a Bustle appeared in public alongside a larger body of poems that reflexively represented the episode in simple partisan terms, moreover, this alternative form constituted an implicit critique of the partisan binary that had come to limit what could be said about the affairs of state. Their appearance also marks a significant, if overlooked, development in early republican literary history, in which poets began to glimpse the implications of a literary-​­political stalemate and responded with a new poetry that resisted such limitations. Such is the case regarding the two final poems we shall examine, which derived their ideological power, paradoxically, from rejecting “politics” as it had come to be defined over the previous decade. Of all the poems on political themes to appear in 1798, two stand out for their divergence from the dominant pattern of literary-​­political exchange: William Munford’s “Political Contest,” and Humphrey Marshall’s Aliens: A Patriotic Poem. Both are unique, first, because they were penned by sitting elected officials—​­Munford a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses and Marshall a senator from Kentucky. They are also notable because they articulate an alternative to the prevailing satiric stalemate by positing a middle way of tolerance and political moderation. “The Political Contest” belongs to the

228   Chapter 6 same tradition of political dialogue poems that had usually been employed for partisan purposes, such as Freneau’s “Rival Suitors for America” and Cobbett’s French Arrogance. In contrast to the binary division in such works between an obvious hero and an equally obvious villain, Munford’s dialogue involves three political voices: an American Jacobin, who openly admits that he wouldn’t mind seeing Adams and Jay guillotined for their crimes and the Constitution overthrown in a French-​­ style revolution; an ardent high-​ F ­ ederalist who threatens the Jacobin with sedition charges; and a third figure, which the poem defines as the true republican, who rejects as equally paranoid the charge that Adams’s administration is a tool for Britain and that Jefferson and Monroe are conspiring against their government: I cannot think that Jefferson, Who so much real good has done; That virtuous patriot and sage, Against his country would engage, Nor e’er believe, he is a traitor, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nor wish the guillotine to slay Adams, and Washington, and Jay, All three great men, who long have serv’d Their country, nor from virtue swerv’d, In war and peace have stood the test.32 As a political argument in its own right, “The Political Contest” strategically carves out a middle position between the respective extremes which is nevertheless consistent with the Democratic-​­Republican movement overall. (Munford, in fact, belonged to the Old Republican group led by John Randolph, and was a literary and legal protegé of St. George Tucker.) Conceding one of central points underlying the Federalist critique of the Republican ­opposition—​­that there does exist a Jacobin faction that considers some members of the current administration as deserving of the guillotine—​­Munford insists that this faction is hardly representative of the Republican Party as a whole. Yet this Jacobin fringe, the poem goes on to argue, is actually a mirror image of an equally extreme Federalist Party, which has made a mockery of liberty by passing the Sedition Act: “Sure in a country, free like ours, / The

Mirror Images   229 government has no such pow’rs, / Freedom of speech to take away, / Might make indeed a bloody day: / I think the people will not bear it.” If fringe opposition figures have contemplated political revolution, they have done so only in reaction to the Federalists’ heavy-​­handed tactics. Munford thus offers a new political philosophy and a new political tone, one that equally acknowledges the patriotism of Adams and Jefferson alike while rejecting the scorched-​ e­ arth Manichaeism of extreme politicians and the poets who support them. This point is reinforced in the poem’s conclusion, as the arch-​­combatants join forces to give the moderate a sound drubbing—​­which they call “the Strongest mode of disputation,” causing the speaker to lament that “moderation in these times, / You see, is deem’d the worst of crimes.”33 A more oblique attempt to redefine the Republican opposition as the more moderate party is found in The Aliens, a literary counterpart to the popular resistance to the Alien Act, which included the passage of the Kentucky Resolutions in Marshall’s home state. This poem engages the controversy over the act by embedding it within the powerful myth of America as a nation of immigrants. In sentimental and inspiring language, Marshall recounts the story of wave after wave of European settlers, beginning with the original Virginia and Plymouth colonies. Echoing the logic found in other classic immigration tracts, such as Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Marshall represents the United States as a country in which the very consciousness of the immigrant is transformed by the realization that he is living under a rational, rather than arbitrary, system of laws: “The country safe, the terms are fair, / The assyulum [sic] great, the rules are mild; / Then let us go, we’ll greet them there, / Come children, come wives, more dear than child.” Finally, addressing the more contentious issue of the latest wave of Irish immigrants—​ ­many of whom were suspected by Federalists of harboring loyalties to the pro-​­Revolutionary United Irishmen—​­Marshall follows Munford’s gesture ­toward moderation by acknowledging the degree of truth underlying such suspicions. A few immigrants harbor allegiance to foreign powers and have come to sow anarchy, but nowhere near enough to warrant the general suspicion held by many Federalists: “All are innocent, in our eyes,” he insists, “Till they are convicted, of a sin.” Thus, in response to The Political Green-​­House and other poems that cheered on the Alien and Sedition Acts as necessary forms of retaliation against an imagined conspiracy, The Aliens offers a decidedly measured response, avoiding the rhetoric of conspiracy altogether and

230   Chapter 6 reserving its harshest judgment for factionalism: “Then statesmen, of Columbia, / Look with equal eyes, t­owards them all; / Shun their parties, and e’en their way, / AMERICANS! be your party call.”34 Importantly, The Aliens and “The Political Contest” would go unanswered in the back-​­and-​­forth atmosphere of literary squabbles, and this outcome, too, seemed intentional. By choosing not to engage the dynamic of literary warfare that dominated the 1790s, the two “statesmen-​­poets” opened space for a discourse which was political, to be sure, but which differed in style and tone from the majority of political poems circulating in print. In the case of “The Political Contest,” the strategy involved rejecting radical pro-​­French rhetoric while holding up Jefferson as the standard-​­bearer of a more moderate Republican movement. (As Jefferson was one of the more pro-​­Revolutionary and partisan Republican leaders, such a move necessitated considerable political sleight of hand.) In the case of The Aliens, it involved associating an obviFederalist position—​­ the opposition to the Alien Act—​­ with a ously anti-​­ powerful myth of America’s immigrant origins. Paradoxically, the very restraint of the poems lent them considerable political force within the broader context of rising partisanship. By reinscribing Jeffersonian Republicans as the moderate wing of the Democratic-​­Republican movement, they deflected Federalist warnings about the dire consequences of handing power to the opposition. Against breathless allegations that the election of Jefferson was tantamount to a Jacobin triumph, “The Political Contest” and The Aliens dispelled such fears as a misreading of the Republican critique of the current administration. Thus did Republican poets finish out the 1790s by portraying themselves as a mirror image of the temperament that had originally been projected by Federalists wits: as moderate, rational, unmoved by the extreme zeal of their opponents, and thus more capable of governing. This possibility of a Republican victory posed new challenges to the poets who had spent the decade portraying the Republican coalition as temperamentally unfit to govern. In all of that time, the growing parity between the two parties had been mitigated by the fact that the opposition had not yet held the presidency and had rarely controlled Congress. Yet when such a transfer of power did finally happen in 1800, the response of Federalist poets would be more varied than might have been predicted during the hyper-​ ­partisan atmosphere of 1798. After a period of initial shock, Federalist poets would be forced to make sense of what increasingly appeared as a rejection of Federalism not merely as a party but as a political philosophy. Underscoring

Mirror Images   231 this sense of decline, as we shall see, the very environment of poetic warfare would begin to dissipate: as Republican poets would settle into penning celebratory odes that no longer even sought to engage with their former enemies, Federalists would offer a range of literary responses to the so-​­called triumph of democracy—​­from doggedly attempting to revive the satiric mood that had sustained them in 1798 to mourning the loss of what they believed to be the true American republic. This is the sense in which the poetry wars of the 1790s would give way to a new poetic conversation, as Federalist poets would communicate largely with each other over how best to respond to the new political reality.

Chapter 7

h The Triumph of Democracy T

he election of 1800 has long been regarded as a momentous political event, abruptly ending the era of Federalist control of the presidency and Congress, and setting in motion a more prolonged development whereby, over several subsequent elections, the party’s numbers diminished to the point of rendering Federalism a regional minority with little influence on national policy. From the vantage point of January 1801, the latter prospect seemed hardly inevitable, not least because Jefferson’s margin of victory over Adams had been small, but also because it wasn’t yet clear whether Jefferson would be named president at all or whether Aaron Burr would somehow slip into office through the odd technicalities of the electoral process. Judging from the dominant tropes of the New Year’s verses in Republican and Federalist papers, however, poets indeed registered a sense of the historic nature of what Jefferson would later call “The Revolution of 1800.” For one anonymous poet writing in the staunchly Federalist New England Palladium, the events of the previous year demanded to be understood in terms of death and bereavement, linking the actual death of Washington with the symbolic death of the national Federalists and the eighteenth century as a whole: “a Century expires! / A WASHINGTON has sought the skies! / Bereaved Federalism dies!” Culminating in the realization that Jefferson—​­or worse, Burr—​­would soon assume the presidency, the poem concludes with an exasperated speaker crying out “Enough!” before offering a prayer for God’s “Preserving Power” to save “This goodly land” from “fell Destruction.” As if in direct retort to such alarm, the carrier’s address of the Republican American Mercury wryly notes that despite the hysterical warnings of “federal priests”

The Triumph of Democracy   233 like Timothy Dwight, the election of 1800 has neither blotted out the sun nor halted the earth from turning: “Sons against Sires have not yet rose, /Nor fathers shot their sons, like crows; / Nor ancient Chaos came again / And delug’d towns in death and sin.” All that has happened, the poet proclaims, is that “freedom’s flame” and the “principles of ’75” have been rekindled, just in time to reset the future course of the republic.1 Weighing these competing narratives in the Mercury’s rival paper, the Connecticut Courant, the other literary Dwight brother, Theodore, suggested that while the election certainly did not herald a grand revival of American liberty, its significance was not as dire as other Federalist poets described it. As the title of his New Year’s poem indicated, the election did constitute a “Triumph of Democracy,” though not in the simple sense of triumph as “victory.” Rather, the poem presents democracy’s triumph as a version of the ancient Roman victory procession, wherein a conquering hero (in this case, Jefferson) rides through the country on a chariot, cheered on by a throng of supporters celebrating the downfall of “Monarchists” and “Aristocrats.” Dwight’s larger verdict on this triumph is that it embodies the same historical fraud inherent in Jeffersonian Democracy as a whole: namely, a pretense to liberty and equality that masks a power grab by a new coterie of interested parties who sycophantically declare Jefferson not president but “Monarch of the People.” Yet as the poem also goes on to imply, the final joke might be at the Democrats’ expense, for the late election returns have suddenly raised the possibility of a very different “people’s king” being crowned, which the speaker treats as more amusing than alarming: Stop—​­ere your civic feasts begin, Wait ’till the votes are all come in; Perchance, amid this mighty stir, Your Monarch may be—​­COL. BURR! Who, if he mounts the sovereign seat, Like BUONAPARTE will make you sweat!”2 The three possibilities offered in these verses provide an instructive preview of the long-​­term questions Americans faced concerning the meaning of Jefferson’s presidency. Though the most obvious conflict pitted exultant Republicans against disappointed Federalists, interpreting the significance of the election also brought to light divergent opinions within the Federalist camp.

234   Chapter 7 Did the Republican Party’s ascendancy portend, as the more frantic voices of the late 1790s had warned, a rise of an American brand of Jacobinism? Would the new president, whose sympathies lay with Paine, Godwin, and other Enlightenment radicals, abandon the political wisdom of the ages in favor of untried, “speculative” theories of government? Was the new majority’s appeal to liberty and rights merely a smokescreen for a form of autocracy that appeared in the guise of republicanism, with Jefferson or some yet-​­unimagined successor arising as an American Bonaparte? Or, alternatively, what if the germ of the Mercury’s argument came to pass, that the Revolution of 1800 proved not as revolutionary as anticipated by partisans on both sides? Anticipating such questions, the poetic responses to the election of 1800 also anticipated new developments in the poetic public sphere as a whole. While the dynamic that had dominated the late 1790s—​­where rival poets reproduced each other’s styles and arguments in mirror image—​­never fully disappeared, it was supplanted by a broad divergence in form and theme among the rival camps of political poets after 1800. Literary admirers of Jefferson settled into a mode of continual celebration over the significance of his presidency, usually in the form of panegyric songs. Frustrated Federalists, for their part, began the decade by doggedly reproducing versions of satires they had written prior to the election, insisting that the damning truth about Jefferson and his party had not yet fully been exposed. The transfer of political power was in this sense accompanied by a transformation at the level of literary warfare, as rival poets came to write past one another in poems projecting starkly divergent ideological realities, broadly corresponding to a poetic conflict between satire and panegyric. In some ways, the satire-​­panegyric split reflected the turnover taking place among the poetic participants themselves. The leading voices of the Republican opposition of the 1790s, Philip Freneau and St. George Tucker, were largely absent from the literary-​­political struggles of the post-​­Jeffersonian moment, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment that they had achieved their long-​ a­ waited dream of political change. And though Theodore Dwight continued to compose occasional New Year’s poems and Richard Alsop, a few years later, contributed a valedictory installment of “The Echo” series, the second-​ ­generation Hartford Wits did not continue as the dominant voices within literary Federalism. Instead, several new groups of writers took Federalist verse in various directions at once. Some fought doggedly on, as if the election of 1800 had never happened and the two parties were still roughly equal in

The Triumph of Democracy   235 political power. Others responded to Federalist electoral losses by abandoning the older strategy of direct political intervention in favor of a new poetry characterized by its alienation from politics itself. Implicitly conceding the argument that had pervaded the poetry wars since the time of the ­Revolution—​ o­ ver which side truly represented the voice of the people—​­such poets would acknowledge a deeper triumph of Democracy as a powerful historical force that had overtaken the American republic and rendered all but hopeless their earlier satiric efforts. And yet, as we shall also see, Federalist laments over having lost the poetry wars of the early republic proved premature, at least for a time. Buoyed by the fallout from the Embargo Act of 1807, a new group of anonymous Federalist wits reentered the fray against a new group of anonymous Republican rivals in a full-​­scale revival of the ballad wars of the Revolution. Glimpsing in the embargo a confirmation of their worst fears of a presidency dominated by speculative policies, Federalist balladeers decried the suffering of ordinary Americans at the hands of Southern and Western politicians whose own fortunes appeared unfairly immune to the collapse of international trade. Importantly, literary warfare inspired by the embargo also corresponded with renewed electoral successes for the Federalist Party after 1808, as they reversed the trend of successive losses they had suffered during most of Jefferson’s presidency and regained momentum in the early years of the War of 1812. Riding a wave of antiembargo and antiwar sentiment, Federalist poets advanced their boldest claim to political relevance in speaking for an indignant plurality of Americans who viewed the war as an ill-​­conceived blunder by the president and his party. Yet this move, which briefly appeared prescient during the difficult early years of the war, would later backfire amid the news of American military successes. For against the backdrop of renewed American patriotism it would appear as a sign of Federalist disloyalty. Thus would the political fortunes of the Federalists dwindle ­toward extinction, bringing to an end both the first party system of the United States and the literary warfare that had, for more than a quarter of a century, helped sustain that system.

Linguistic Unmasking and the Problem of Jefferson In the weeks leading up to Jefferson’s inauguration in March 1801, Republican newspapers from New Hampshire to Kentucky were bombarded with celebratory songs declaring that the election represented more than

236   Chapter 7 merely a temporary partisan advantage; indeed, they declared it to be a final, decisive victory in the people’s ongoing struggle for liberty. This is the point, for instance, of the inaugural song “The People’s Friend,” which presents Jefferson’s ascendancy as the conclusive undoing of a long-​­standing conspiracy by men of “subtle arts” to plan the “nation’s ruin.” Just at the moment when “past events portended harm” and “rais’d the spirit of alarm,” leaving the future of the republic uncertain at best, suddenly “the prospect clear’d / And a bright star of hope appear’d / The people’s chosen friend.” A similar narrative of America’s narrow escape from tyranny is found in the oft-​­reprinted “Jefferson and Liberty,” which depicts the new political era as the end of the “reign of Terror” brought by the Alien and Sedition Acts: “THE gloomy night before us flies, / The reign of Terror now is o’er; / Its Gags, Inquisitors and Spies, / Its herds of harpies are no more! / Rejoice! Columbia’s Sons rejoice! / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ For Jefferson and Liberty.”3 Such songs reveal much about the Republican mind-​­set in 1801. The imagery of light chasing away the gloom of Federalism, beyond reiterating the party’s identification with the Enlightenment, reinforces the belief that America has achieved a profound and lasting political change. That such change is described as the result of a long-​­standing struggle against tyrants and conspirators, moreover, supports the underlying claim that the Jeffersonian opposition had always represented the true voice of the people. Yet perhaps most telling about these and other paeans to Jefferson from the early years of his administration is the palpable sense of exhilaration and certainty that the political warfare of the Federalist era is over, that the “Republican interest” has won the day, and that a new chapter in American political history is beginning: REJOICE, ye states, rejoice

And spread the patriot flame; Call’d by a nation’s voice; To save his country’s fame; And dissipate increasing fears, Our favorite JEFFERSON appears.4 Nor would this sense of unmitigated triumph over having saved America let up in the years to follow, as the same themes would be rehearsed in panegyric hymns and odes that made up the most common form of Republican

The Triumph of Democracy   237 verse during Jefferson’s presidency. This is significant, for, as we saw in earlier contexts, patriotic songs enacted a literal univocality to symbolize political unity, as is evident, for instance, in this ode from an 1803 inaugural anniversary celebration: “Let every Freeman join the lay, / And lift his eager plauding hand! / Shout HUZZAS! to the happy day, / That brightened FREEDOM’s favorite land!” Yet while earlier political songs sometimes posited a rival chorus that the song intended to drown out, postelection Jeffersonian odes and hymns downplayed the very idea of a viable Federalist opposition. Indeed, the once-​­threatening Federalists figure in pro-​­Republican songs largely as villains from the past, “rats” who have “left the ship” of state after seeing their hopes destroyed, as one song puts it, or a powerless faction whose embarrassing numbers in the Congress inspire pity rather than fear. “Poor Feds,” writes one newspaper poet in the wake of the midterm elections of 1806, “Must’ring, at last, their troop, with much ado, / Fourteen against one hundred, sixty-​­two.”5 Equally noteworthy about pro-​­Jeffersonian celebratory songs is that they announced themselves as occasional rather than topical. Composed for inaugural anniversaries and Fourth of July celebrations, the songs implicitly argued that the simple fact of Jefferson’s presidency was more important than the events that would unfold during his administration. For audiences accustomed to thinking of the history of the American republic as a struggle between aristocrats and common people, such songs declared a kind of “end to history.” America had been “ruin’d, very nearly, / By fellows, taught in Federal schools, / To name the People Apes and Fools,” declares one poet, before confidently adding, “Past is the aera of their crimes, / And we are blest with happier times.”6 With this grand struggle concluded, so, apparently, was the need to engage in the sort of tit-​­for-​­tat exchanges that had dominated the previous decade. Federalist poets responded to the flood of pro-​­Jefferson panegyrics as if peering into an alternate reality that they could scarcely comprehend, let alone oppose. Having long insisted that Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution and his broad alignment with religious skeptics like Paine and Godwin was enough to disqualify him for high office, many Federalists began the decade holding out hope that the new Republican majority would prove short-​­lived. Faced with the challenge of having to answer a barrage of songs and poems declaring the election of 1800 as the political miracle that saved the republic from tyranny, Federalist poets would spend the better part of Jefferson’s first term doubling down on their campaign of satiric intervention.

238   Chapter 7 Though they had failed to prevent his narrow election, they might still succeed in clearing away the layers of delusion that prevented the public from recognizing Jefferson’s true political character. As various political poets in earlier eras had reasoned, achieving the goal of exposing the true Jefferson involved making his exact words and opinions known to the public. Thus would Federalist poets after 1800 revive the strategy of infusing into their poems direct quotations from Jefferson’s speeches, letters, and other published works, which purportedly provided proof of the new president’s dishonest and immoral character. Such was the strategy of the Connecticut Courant’s New Year’s retrospective of the president’s first year in office, “Symptoms of the Millennium, in the Year 1801.” Countering the exultant mood of the panegyric odes that had appeared throughout the year, this poem takes as its main satiric conceit the belief that Jefferson’s election marked the beginning of a new “political millennium” characterized by a spirit of goodwill and an end to partisan fighting: “OFT has the period been foretold, / By Prophets, and by Seers of old,” the poem begins, “When fists no more ’gainst fists should rise, / No bloody nose, no blacken’d eyes.” At the center of this depiction of the millennial dawn is a parodic rendition of Jefferson’s first inaugural address, which, after conceding that the recent “contest of opinion” had been characterized by “animation of discussion and of exertions,” declared that as the election had been “decided by the voice of the nation,” it was now time to “unite in common efforts for the common good.” As the new president famously stated, “Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. . . . ​We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” In doing so, Jefferson called upon what we now recognize as the familiar convention of calling for unity after a bitter electoral contest. Yet in an early example of mocking such a gesture as an empty rhetorical ploy, the poem reframes the speech as an elaborate performance, which begins with Jefferson ceremonially ascending to “GREAT WASHINGTON’s exalted seat” and proceeds to his delivering (in the melodious voice for which he was known and sometimes mocked) a message of national healing: But hark! what soft and dulcet note, Pours from his philanthropic throat? “Behold I come, prepar’d to heal All bruises in the Commonweal,

The Triumph of Democracy   239 Sweet Harmony again restore, Blest Intercourse shall bleed no more. We’re brothers of the self-​­same breed, A Demo-​­Janglo-​­Federal seed. Soon shall this land from sorrow rest, ‘And all the sons of want be blest.’ ”7 Drawing on Jefferson’s original language of restoring “harmony” to “social intercourse,” the poem recasts the speech as an attempt to emphasize his personal importance to the process of national healing—​­“Behold I come, prepar’d to heal”—​­thus representing the new president as a self-​­proclaimed savior of the republic. This point is especially emphatic in the final line of the passage above, which is borrowed not from Jefferson’s speech but from Isaac Watts’s millennial hymn “Jesus Shall Reign.” Yet the passage’s main satirical point is to expose the famous phrase “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans” as inherently deceptive, indicated by the root “janglo” (meaning discord or idle chatter) in the phrase “Demo-​­Janglo-​­Federal seed.” The absurdity of the phrase reminds readers that not only has Jefferson failed to miraculously restore political harmony, his pretense to having done so only reveals the disingenuousness of his language all the more. The poet returns to this point a few lines later when he references another memorable phrase from the original speech, where Jefferson defends his platform of limited and indirect taxation by declaring that a “wise and frugal Government” must not “take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Besides allowing the satirist to linger on the phrase’s stylistic awkwardness, the reproduction of this phrase in parodic form brings to light another perceived tendency in Jefferson’s rhetoric; to mask his lack of policy specifics with figurative language. Or, as the parodied Jefferson puts it, “Soon ‘Labour’s mouth’ its jaws shall ope, / And feed on Metaphor and Trope.”8 Though not, strictly speaking, a verse parody in the same sense as the anti-​ ­Gage versifications or “The Echo,” “Symptoms of the Millennium” follows a similar strategy of drawing its audience’s attention to Jefferson’s exact words, in this case to expose his speech as a series of rhetorical manipulations for political effect. At the same time, the practice of mining Jefferson’s speeches and past writings for incriminatory evidence suggests an even greater ambition: to expose aspects of the new president’s character that are so damning as to rouse his supporters from their current state of enthrallment. In this case, Federalist

240   Chapter 7 verse after the election of 1800 can be seen to draw on another long-​­standing poetic tradition—​­the poetry of conspiracy—​­in its act of assembling a series of distinct (and sometimes mutually exclusive) cases against Jefferson’s fitness for office. Among the statements by Jefferson that Federalists never tired of reprising were those from a 1796 letter to his friend Philip Mazzei, in which the former secretary of state characterized the political divisions in America as pitting the “main body of citizens,” who hold true Republican principles, and a coalition of Federalists—​­“timid men,” as Jefferson described them, “who prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.” After it was published in the pro-​­Federalist American Minerva, the letter proved especially embarrassing because Jefferson seemed to include President Washington among those who had spurned republicanism in favor of British-​­style aristocracy: “It should give you a fever, if I should name the apostates who have embraced these heresies; men who were Solomons in the council, and Samsons in combat, but whose hair has been cut off by the whore England.” Long after this initial scandal erupted, the Mazzei letter continued to be regarded as damning to Jefferson’s political character, not merely for its insinuation that the universally beloved Washington was himself disloyal, but also for Jefferson’s use of the phrase “tempestuous sea of liberty.” Calling to mind another notorious sentence from one of Jefferson’s older letters, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” this phrase conveyed a tolerance of tumult, radicalism, and even violence as a part of the natural course of political change. Thus it is that Federalist poets would increasingly refer to Jefferson as “Mazzei’s Sampson” and the new political landscape as “JEFFERSON’s tempestuous sea.”9 Contrasting with this portrait of Jefferson as a would-​­be political radical was another common caricature, also drawn from quotations and references to his writings, of him as a dilettante scholar of natural history who was fascinated by animal bones, fossils, and natural anomalies. References to Jefferson the naturalist, as recorded in Notes on the State of Virginia, had appeared sporadically prior to his election, but the Louisiana Purchase—​­and more specifically the publication of An Account of Louisiana, a work commissioned by Jefferson and presented to Congress—​­made his forays into natural history suddenly relevant to national policy. Though not actually written by Jefferson, the Account was nonetheless treated as his work in the Federalist press, in part

The Triumph of Democracy   241 because the language of the report, which at times rose to unexpected levels of enthusiasm in its descriptions of the new territory, seemed in keeping with existing stereotypes about Jefferson’s zeal for the subject. The tone of the Account, which describes the newly acquired land as an “immense prairie” more fertile than anywhere in the world and breathlessly conveys the “extraordinary fact” of a one-​­hundred-​­eighty-​­mile long “Salt Mountain” near the Missouri River, led one newspaper to remark that the report reads as if “copied from Mrs. Radcliff’s Mysteries of Udolpho.” Not surprisingly, the report would provide another opportunity for satirists to highlight what they viewed as a tendency to be drawn to exaggerations and mythical tales of “Towns, cities, Indians, Spaniards, ‘prairies,’ / Salt-​­petre vats, and buffaloe dairies, / Harvests all ripen’d for the sickle, / And salt enough the world to pickle.”10 The most frequently cited example of Jefferson’s passion for natural history was his particular fascination for wooly mammoths and mammoth bones. Going back to his speculation in the Notes that the mammoth may still roam the Western territories (a claim he used to counter the comte de Buffon’s theory of the natural degeneracy of the New World), Jefferson’s interest in mammoths led him to seek to procure for the American Philosophical Society a set of mammoth bones discovered in New York, and to send the explorer, William Clark, to Kentucky in search of another. For his supporters, Jefferson’s fondness for mammoths was an endearing personal trait, such that, throughout his presidency, he would be feted with “mammoth” hunks of cheese and “mammoth” loaves of bread. For his political opponents, it signified not only a personal eccentricity but also a failure in judgment, an inability to suspend rational skepticism about the various natural wonders that he undoubtedly hoped were true: “At random here the Mammoth browses, / As large as common meeting-​­houses, / Snakes reach the size of saw-​­mill logs, / And rats and mice as large as dogs.”11 As long as this tendency t­oward wishful thinking involved mammoths and salt mountains, the caricature of Jefferson the amateur natural philosopher appeared harmless enough. Yet other references to Jefferson’s scientific writings presented an altogether more ominous image of the “philosophical” Jefferson. Most notably, his observations on the physical and intellectual differences between the black and white races, also from Notes on the State of Virginia, revealed a tendency to invoke scientific discourse in tacit defense of a false and exploitative racial hierarchy:

242   Chapter 7 Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-​­skin, or in the scarf-​­skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? . . . ​Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.

As we saw in Chapter 4, this passage had provided fodder for Lemuel Hopkins’s earlier satiric treatment of Jefferson’s suggestion of the biological kinship between Africans and orangutans. In the wake of James Callender’s 1802 exposé of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, poets began to cite the passage as evidence of Jefferson’s hypocrisy on the issue of interracial sexual desire. Yet at least one Federalist poet alluded to the language of the Notes as a warning about the moral offense implicit in couching racial bigotry in the language of science. Writing in response to Jefferson’s declaration in the inaugural address that America is the asylum for the “oppressed humanity” of the world, the poet first reminds readers that Jefferson’s status as a slave owner implies a comparative lack of sympathy for an oppressed class of humanity closer to home: “But while to vagrant tribes our laws are kind, / The sable sans-​ c­ ulottes no mercy find.” And this very lack of sympathy, the poem goes on to say, distorts his scientific observations by fundamentally clouding his perception. Drawing in particular on Jefferson’s comparison of blacks and whites with regard to beauty and smell, the poet suggests that Jefferson’s very senses have been tainted by white supremacy, and that this view, in turn, has led Jefferson to embrace a number of absurd anthropological conclusions, including the inflammatory myth that black men harbor a “natural” desire for white women:

The Triumph of Democracy   243 A deadly sin the NEGRO’s breast imbues, He loves the “female,” more than MAMMOTH does; And viler still—​­to him, whose pointer nose Smells not a poppy, as it smells a rose—​­ The NEGRO, formed a slave from Nature’s hands, “Sweats more at pores, and less secretes at glands.”12 Jefferson the radical democrat, Jefferson the crank naturalist, Jefferson the racial anthropologist: all of these caricatures depended on the conviction that beneath the statesman’s veneer stood a fool or villain waiting to be exposed, and that the key to defeating Jefferson was to make his words and opinions known to the public. Yet as Federalists discovered over the course of Jefferson’s first term, this strategy contained several crucial limitations. The first lay in the relative threat implied by the varied portrayals of Jefferson: was he a harmless eccentric, most interested in his collection of animal bones, or something more sinister? And if the latter, was Jefferson a dangerous revolutionary or the leader of a powerful bloc of Southern slaveholders? Compounding this problem was the fact that such caricatures of Jefferson, while assailing his character, had virtually nothing to do with the policies of his administration. A few poets, to be sure, had taken aim at his early governing philosophy, criticizing his insistence on maintaining a “frugal” government, for instance, by pointing out its implications for the size and readiness of the military. Yet, as was undoubtedly frustrating to many Federalist wits, Jefferson’s policies did not appear sufficiently ominous to call up the grand satiric narratives that had sustained literary warfare in earlier decades. Nor was this situation lost on pro-​­Jeffersonian wits, who occasionally pointed out that despite the “Gallons of ink” expended by Federalist writers, the administration’s actions have given them no legitimate cause to rail: Well Feds, it seems another year Has trundled off, and yet we’re here, In spite of all denunciation Pour’d piping hot upon the nation, The young Republic’s yet alive, And, let me tell you, seems to thrive.13 Few Federalists would concede that the republic under Jefferson was thriving, but they could hardly ignore the fact that the president’s party gained in

244   Chapter 7 popularity through his first term while Federalists continued to lose seats in Congress. The significance of this development was that it exposed the limits of the ongoing Federalist literary effort to disqualify Jefferson through satiric unmasking, and this exposure, in turn, led to a crisis of confidence among Federalist poets. As one poet laments after Jefferson’s landslide reelection in 1804, four years of satiric attacks have failed to impede the political ascendancy of their “democratic” opponents: “While democrats their conquest boast, / See Johnny Randolph rule the roast; / And on the presidential throne / Still perch’d the recreant Jefferson”—​­leaving the poet to wonder anxiously, “Is thy poetic fervor dead, / That Satire’s lyre has lost its tone?”14 As the use of the moniker “democrats” in this passage implies, one explanation for the failure of satire to stem the Republican tide was that, even as such verse focused on Jefferson as the lynchpin for the movement as a whole, the triumph of Democracy posed a more all-​­encompassing problem. Indeed, the very term “Democracy” is crucial for understanding Federalist discourse as a whole during Jefferson’s presidency, serving several related ideological functions at once. Most immediately, it denied members of the party of Jefferson their preferred title of “Republican” by reminding readers that within the classical republican tradition, democracy was a pejorative term, largely synonymous with what was often referred to as “mobocracy.” Yet beyond this, the term “Democracy” gave Federalists a language to comprehend the rise of the Jeffersonian party as a symptom of historical forces more powerful than any single individual, which threatened to transform America at the level not merely of government but of society or culture more broadly. This underlying logic explains the appearance of poems with such titles as “The Demon of Democracy,”15 but it also explains another shift in Federalist verse over the course of Jefferson’s presidency, one in which poets would increasingly suspect that the Democratic ascendancy might prove impervious to their satiric assaults, and thus warranted a different kind of literary response. Nowhere is this realization communicated more dramatically—​­and, importantly, through the use of poetic form—​­than in the New Year’s retrospective from the New England Palladium that appeared in January 1803. Though the poem begins as carrier’s addresses had done for more than a decade, with the poet rehearsing various events from the previous year in fast-​­paced octosyllabic couplets, about midway through it suddenly shifts to a new metrical form—​­blank verse—​­as the speaker despondently begins to mourn what he describes as a profound alternation in America’s national character:

The Triumph of Democracy   245 O, that Columbia were once more herself! Then would thy virtues make a nation blest, In dignity and office join’d with him, The patriot envoy with the noble name. The Federal Sun would shine in cloudless day, Scattering the foul fogs of Democracy.16 In representing the current political moment as one in which the “Federal Sun” has been blotted out by the “foul fogs of Democracy,” the poem suggests that the challenge faced by Federalists goes far beyond the problem of Jefferson, or even his party. The reference to “fogs” points to a change in public perception, and the passage’s opening lament that Columbia is no longer “herself ” suggests a more far-​­reaching and enduring transformation than can be reversed in a single political election. Corresponding with the description of Democracy’s ascent is a decidedly more fatalistic approach to the question of the appropriate literary response: having symbolically dispensed with the verse form and tone that had dominated poetic warfare in previous decades, the speaker assumes a tone and verse form associated with lyric, and even more particularly, elegiac, verse. As is reinforced in the subjunctive mood of “were” and “would,” this is a poetry that, rather than projecting a belief in its own capacity to intervene in history, communicates the poet’s struggle to accept an irreversible political loss. The same need to come to terms with loss accounts for the broader development within literary Federalism that William Dowling has called its “retreat from history.” This is the process by which a significant number of Federalist-​ l­eaning writers, having concluded that their earlier satiric struggle against the forces of Democracy had proved futile, began to propose in its place a conception of literature as necessarily separate from (and even opposed to) the tumult of political warfare. The epicenter of this retreat, as Dowling’s research shows, was Joseph Dennie’s Port Folio, a magazine Dennie founded initially as an organ for the sorts of anti-​­Jeffersonian attacks found elsewhere in the Federalist press but later presented as a space for culturally minded readers to find solace from the world of politics. Though the majority of the Port Folio’s publications were prose essays and reviews, the magazine regularly included poetic submissions by various members of Dennie’s extensive literary network. They included, to be sure, several explicitly political verses, but these were increasingly overshadowed by poems that communicated the same emerging elegiac

246   Chapter 7 strain of literary Federalism, such as the poems found in Samuel Ewing’s verse series “Reflections in Solitude.” As the titular emphasis on solitude suggests, the series as a whole is characterized by the alienation of the speaker from what he describes as the “busy world,” dominated by greed and ambition for power. Yet as he emphasizes in one installment, he is especially alienated from the emerging environment of political discourse that he attributes to the rise of Democracy. Recounting a visit to a local “village inn,” he describes his encounter with a group of “angry zealots” discordantly arguing about politics, which leads the speaker to immediately depart, “Disgusted . . . ​at the idle buzz / Discordant”: Within a crowd of noisy rustics roar’d Tumultuous, eager to unfold the stock Of information, that in spite of idleness, Did float around their brains—​­the slender gleanings Of the city’s herald, that each week announc’d Few facts, more falsehoods, and fine-​­spun web Of philosophic theory, to trap Their flutt’ring sense; that did hover round The meteor of liberty, and teach The rights of man to those, who did degrade Themselves as beasts. . . .17 On one level, the speaker is repelled by the political content of the noisy roar itself, which he describes in the last lines as drawn from Republican newspapers—​­that is, newspapers that regularly invoke the language of the rights of man. Yet the primary satiric target in this passage is the dwindled state of political discourse itself, in which what passes for argument is the mere parroting of the “slender gleanings” of such papers, which impart not facts but falsehoods and theories, and succeed only in making the members of the crowd angrier and more insistent on their partisan views. Equally remarkable about this passage, particularly against the backdrop of the development of political verse from the 1790s, is its representation of the poet’s relationship to political discourse: rather than use poetry to engage in public debate, the poem here suggests a new role for the poet in standing opposed to the tumult of political warfare and delivering a moral verdict on its failings. What is not acknowledged here is the degree to which the culture of literary warfare itself,

The Triumph of Democracy   247 particularly in the years leading up to the so-​­called triumph of Democracy, had contributed to the rise in zealotry and anger that the speaker denounces. Beyond representing the poetic sensibility as fundamentally opposed to the tumult of political struggle, moreover, the poetry of the Port Folio would also posit literature as the sphere to which one escapes when one feels alienated from politics. This is seen, for instance, in Thomas Sergeant’s poem “Reflections in the City,” which touts, in particular, the literary and cultural societies that had emerged in several American cities in the first decade of the nineteenth century—​­not only the Port Folio group in Philadelphia but also the Monthly Anthology society in Boston and the Salmagundi group in New York. Though all of these groups were made up of writers who harbored pro-​ ­Federalist leanings, they also increasingly came to eschew direct political engagement in favor of immersing themselves in an alternative world of literary appreciation and conversation. Or, as Sergeant puts it, “if the boist’rous din of politics / Delights us not, here may we greet the group / Of literary minds, congenial / To our own taste: receiving and imparting / New pleasures from our former studious toil.”18 In suggesting that literature offered solace against the din of politics, “Reflections in the City” and other companion pieces in the Port Folio offered a solution to what Marshall Foletta has described as the problem of “coming to terms with Democracy.” Yet more important in relation to the subject of this study, such works offered an alternative to literary warfare itself as it had developed over the previous four decades. No longer placing their faith in satire to stem the tide of the Democratic ascendancy, such poets as Sergeant and Ewing came to reject the older interventionist conception of political verse in favor of a new ideal of poetry as an end unto itself, a source of aesthetic pleasure shared by like-​­minded friends. Insofar as declarations of this symbolic retreat from politics rose to the level of a literary vogue in its own right, moreover, this development may be seen in retrospect as an early sign of the eventual decline of political verse in American culture and, indeed, an early indication of the “lyricization of poetry” that would take hold later in the nineteenth century. Such developments would hardly herald a definitive end of Federalist satiric attacks against Jefferson and other prominent Republicans; such attacks would continue well into the administration of James Madison. Yet they would nonetheless mark a moment at which to engage in poetic warfare as poets had done in the 1790s was to project an image of oneself as, in some sense, a cultural holdover of a bygone era. And this image, as we shall

248   Chapter 7 see, would be increasingly recognizable not only to one’s ideological opponents but to one’s allies as well. 19

Retrospective Poetry Wars In January 1807, the “Citizens of Washington” held an “elegant” dinner in honor of Captain Meriwether Lewis’s triumphant return from his Northwest expedition, “as an expression of their personal respect and affection, of the high sense of the service he has rendered his country.” News reports of the occasion listed the prominent guests and the various toasts offered, and reprinted the poem composed for the occasion, “On the discoveries of Captain Lewis,” by one of the dinner’s attendees, Joel Barlow.20 Beyond serving its commemorative function, the poem provided Barlow himself with an opportunity to promote his recent return to the United States after eighteen years abroad, as well as his return to writing public verse after the long hiatus that had followed the publication of The Conspiracy of Kings in 1792. At the time of the celebration, Barlow was putting the finishing touches on his epic The Columbiad, which would appear later in the year. And indeed, his tribute to Lewis would highlight one of the dominant themes in the epic: the inexorable progress of Enlightenment in dispelling the “darkness” that had impeded human knowledge in past ages. In this sense, Barlow’s tribute to Lewis stood also as a tribute to Jefferson’s presidency—​­in particular, the acquisition and exploration of the Louisiana Territory—​­as a culminating moment in the progressive course of history. Barlow gets at this sense of progress by representing it as part of an ongoing global effort to “drag” the “dark regions” of the earth into the light. Contrasting the newly explored American West with the enduring darkness of a continent like Africa, he proclaims, “Let the Nile cloak his head in the clouds and defy, / The researches of science and time,” for such is not the case with America: “not so shall thy boundless domain, / Defraud their brave sons of their right; / Streams, midlands and shorelands illude us in vain, / We shall drag their dark regions to light.” As the poem goes on to argue, Lewis has achieved a godlike feat in “seizing the car of the sun” and binding the “proud earth” within a “new zone” of enlightened dominion. This is the exploration of the West as the latest in a long series of scientific, commercial, and philosophical advances that Barlow would celebrate in The Columbiad as heralding a future age of universal peace and prosperity.21

The Triumph of Democracy   249 Yet even amid such forward-​­gazing imagery there remained in Barlow’s return to the literary public sphere a distinctly retrospective aspect, first, in its unacknowledged but evident reminder that Barlow had been rehearsing these same themes for his entire poetic career, from his earliest published poem in 1778, The Prospect of Peace, to his 1787 epic, The Vision of Columbus, on which the newly revised Columbiad was based. Yet “On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis” proved retrospective in another sense as well, as it inspired a prompt tit-​­for-​­tat response by a rival poet, which had become increasingly rare during Jefferson’s presidency. Appearing a few months later in the Monthly Anthology was a poem bearing the same title but with an additional descriptor stating only that the lines were “not from the pen of Mr. Barlow; nor were they recited . . . ​at the ‘elegant dinner,’ given by the Citizens of Washington to Captain Lewis.” The poem’s authorship has since been attributed to future president John Quincy Adams, who would later contribute to the broader sense of the Federalists’ political decline by changing his party allegiance to the Republicans in 1808. Yet in this poem Adams writes as an avowed Federalist whose primary goal is to diminish one of the signature achievements of Jefferson’s presidency by bathetically replacing Barlow’s triumphant tone with that of an ironic ballad strain reminiscent of “The Battle of the Kegs”: “GOOD people, listen to my tale,/ ’Tis nothing but what true is; / I’ll tell you of the mighty deeds / Achiev’d by Captain Lewis.” Nor does it veer far in content from standard anti-​­Jefferson verse, as it uses Lewis’s expedition as an occasion for rehashing various hackneyed jabs at Jefferson’s naturalist and anthropological preoccupations: thus, among the things Lewis did not find on his journey, the poem points out, was a “Mammoth,” a “Mountain sous’d in Pickle,” and “an Indian tribe / From Welshmen straight descended”—​­all familiar tropes to anyone who had been reading political verse from the time of Jefferson’s first election.22 Amid such clichés, Adams’s poem advances one powerful counterargument to Barlow’s overarching faith in enlightenment and human progress. In this retelling, the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition lies not in propelling human beings to godlike heights or binding the earth in a “zone” of scientific domination but in revealing the relative insignificance of human achievement in the face of the vastness of geological time. Countering Barlow’s lofty claim that Lewis has “tam’d the last tide of the west” in his navigation of the Columbia River, Adams notes that Lewis has not really tamed, or changed, anything; “Had rivers ask’d him of their path, / They had but mov’d

250   Chapter 7 his laughter—​­/ They knew their courses, all, as well / Before he came as after.” And in response to Barlow’s proposal that the Columbia River be renamed the Lewis, Adams sarcastically counters that what Barlow hails as progress is actually little more than renaming natural formations that will remain unchanged for the entirety of the human era; or, as the speaker goes on to say, “if we cannot alter things, / By G—, we’ll change their names, sir.”23 Beyond providing a window into the competing ideological interpretations of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Barlow-​­Adams exchange stands as an example of a largely unrecognized trend in political verse during Jefferson’s presidency: the tendency of poets to look symbolically backward to what must have seemed a livelier age of political warfare. First, Barlow’s return to writing poetry on national affairs, particularly his publication of The Columbiad, was part of a larger pattern in the first decade of the nineteenth century, in which older or retiring literary warriors revised and reprinted works from their poetic primes. Many of the best-​­known political poets of the 1790s and earlier reprinted their fugitive verse in new collections, such as Freneau’s 1809 collection, Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War, and the 1807 publication by the surviving members of the “Echo” group of The Echo, With Other Poems. In addition to making available their most popular works, and reminding younger audiences of their prominence in the turbulent early days of national formation, such efforts carried the tacit suggestion that though the original historical context for such works had passed, the wisdom gleaned from them might yet prove relevant to the present. At the same time, such retrospective gestures would take on different forms, based on the degree of political relevance being claimed by respective poets: while some authors looked back self-​­consciously to a poetical-​­political era acknowledged as past, others rehashed the satiric tropes of the 1790s as if in denial that the political landscape had shifted over the ensuing years. The most obvious example of this latter type of retrospective literary warfare was Thomas Green Fessenden’s Democracy Unveiled; or, Tyranny stripped of the Garb of Patriotism, which, despite appearing during Jefferson’s second term, reads like a time capsule from the 1790s. Fessenden, we may recall, had been a contributor in those years to Joseph Dennie’s Farmer’s Weekly Museum, writing under the pseudonym “Simon Spunkey.” Yet during the same period that Dennie left New Hampshire for Philadelphia to found the Port Folio, Fessenden left the United States altogether to pursue a series of unsuccessful business ventures in England. Returning to Boston in 1804, he immediately

The Triumph of Democracy   251 set out to revive his satiric career with a new pseudonym, “Christopher Caustic,” and an ambitious new project. In terms of linguistic proliferation alone, Democracy Unveiled was a massive effort, containing hundreds of lines of verse divided into six cantos, as well as countless lengthy footnotes explaining and substantiating the litany of accusations against Jefferson and other Republicans. That Fessenden regarded the poem as an instrument of ideological unmasking is clear in his promise in the subtitle, to “strip” Democracy of the “Garb of Patriotism,” and in the preface, which draws on the conspiracy verse tradition in his explanation of how he composed the work out of “a deep conviction, that our civil and political rights . . . ​are menaced by bad men now dominant, and bad principles, inculcated by the demagogues and philosophists of the day.” Declaring that an “exposition of their arts is absolutely incumbent on every man . . . ​who holds the pen of a writer,” Fessenden acknowledges that his efforts will make him “not a few inveterate personal enemies.” But he vows to face whatever hostility comes, for the “wish to be serviceable to my country, is paramount to every other consideration.”24 In introducing the poem in this way, Fessenden tapped into the dominant sentiments of frustrated Federalists in 1801. If the people “had known that many men who now fill the highest offices in the government, were destitute of common honesty,” he writes, they would never have abandoned the Federalist Party in the first place. Yet despite the fact that Fessenden published his poem in 1805, after Jefferson had won reelection and the Republican Party had continued to gain seats in Congress, the poet presents his argument as if nothing has changed in the ensuing years. Seemingly unaware, moreover, of the development in which many of his former compatriots abandoned satire for more elegiac strains of Federalist verse, Fessenden confronts the Republican opposition as it existed in the Federalist imagination in 1798. This is nowhere more obvious than in the poem’s second canto, entitled “Illuminism,” which rehashes the Illuminati conspiracy with scarcely any awareness that the topic has become conspicuously absent from Federalist verse, presumably out of the recognition that such discourse has proved embarrassing to the party. Though he acknowledges that “every hound in the Democratic pack” will attack him for raising what they call the “phantom of Illuminism,” he insists that “certain damning facts . . . ​will ever stare them in the face.” Thus Fessenden doubles down on a strategy of recounting the sweeping narrative of the conspiracy by the Illuminati—​­in particular, their infiltration of the Democratic-​­Republican societies in America—​­to finally “exorcise” the “fiend” of Jacobinism from “our

252   Chapter 7 land, / Who erst with desolating hand, / Bade Democrats, a horrid train, / Half Europe heap with hills of slain.”25 In contrast to the more nuanced conception of Democracy found in the poetry appearing at the same moment in the Port Folio and elsewhere, Democracy Unveiled seeks to vindicate the truth of various anti-​­Democratic poems from the 1790s. First and foremost, as indicated in its reference to heaps of slain bodies, the poem presents the rise of the Jeffersonian party as a wholesale importation of French radicalism to America. In addition, Fessenden implicates Jefferson personally as the leader of this scheme, insinuating that the president had likely been schooled in Illuminist principles during his ambassadorship to France. Indeed, the poem’s fourth canto is entitled “The Jeffersoniad,” and it focuses on the same flaws of character and political philosophy that had long since been rehearsed in anti-​­Jeffersonian satire: the religious skeptic who cared not a whit whether his neighbor worshipped twenty gods or one, and the author of the Mazzei letter, who “blast[ed]” Washington’s reputation in order to justify his radical bona fides to a foreign “scoundrel.”26 Underlying the anxious conspiracy narrative of the rise of Democracy, once again, stands an implicit faith in the power of poetry to ensure that the truth will ultimately win out. This aspect of the poem’s purpose, in fact, is most evident in its copious footnotes (often an entire page of notes accompanying a mere two lines of verse), which serve to reinforce the poem’s expository, rather than merely performative, function. Indeed, a narrative of political restoration through revelation controls the poem’s final two cantos—​­“The Gibbet of Satire,” which presents a classic rogues’ gallery of Republican leaders being symbolically “hanged” for their crimes, and “The Monition,” in which the speaker imparts his final hope, “that when you’re plainly show’d / Your Democratic, downhill road, / Is dire destruction’s dismal rout, / You’ll condescend to turn about.”27 Fessenden’s unwavering belief that the ideological spell of Democracy could be broken would continue for the remainder of his career, including in another lengthy poem from 1809, Pills, Poetical, Political, and Philosophical. Prescribed for the Purpose of Purging the Publick of Piddling Philosophers, of Puny Poetasters, of Paltry Politicians, and Petty Partisans. Ironically, Fessenden’s imagined conceptions of Democracy and satiric warfare bore little resemblance to realities of Jefferson’s second term: whatever Democracy was in 1805, it was not a Jacobin mob, and whatever literary Federalism had become, it was hardly a viable means for reversing a large-​­scale shift in partisan loyalties.

The Triumph of Democracy   253 Yet if Democracy Unveiled brings to light an aspect particular to Federalist poetry—​­namely, the desire to deny its own failure to influence recent political trends—​­the tendency to wage older literary struggles was not limited to Federalists like Fessenden. In fact, a close Republican counterpart to Democracy Unveiled can be found in The Hamiltoniad: Or, an Extinguisher for the Royal Faction of New-​­England, by John Williams, who published the poem under the pseudonym “Anthony Pasquin.” Appearing scarcely two months after Alexander Hamilton’s death at the hands of Aaron Burr, The Hamiltoniad was a mock-​­heroic burlesque of the Federalist reaction to, and the political fallout from, this momentous event. Disingenuously claiming that he does not intend the treat Hamilton’s death with “incivility,” Pasquin insists that his purpose is merely to ridicule the “floods of adulation” in the Federalist press, which “have been so extravagant and so puerile.” Yet he departs from this plan almost immediately, accounting for Hamilton’s death as the result of a command by “Fate” to remove the leader of “the ROYAL FACTION ” from the political stage. From here The Hamiltoniad turns to the political consequences of Hamilton’s death, which the poem portrays chiefly as a growing realization among Federalists that they have no hope of ever regaining power: “When HAMILTON’s great spirit upward flew / Hope shut her gates upon the federal crew.” Over the course of the next three cantos, this realization is represented in personal terms, in satirical depictions of grieving Federalists like Timothy Pickering and Joseph Dennie, and in allegorical terms, as personified figures like “Treason,” “Terror,” and “Superstition” all “twist, and foam, and whimper, spit and scold, / As Satan and his caucus did, of old.” Beyond what the poem reveals about the lengths partisans were willing to go to celebrate their enemies’ political setbacks, The Hamiltoniad stands out for its revival of the rhetorical and literary conventions typical of Republican poetry from the 1790s. In mirror image of Fessenden’s backward glance in Democracy Unveiled, Williams rehearses terms like “royalism” and “aristocracy” to depict the Federalists as elitist Anglophiles, and even calls up earlier images of demonic conspiracy in frequent references to Satan and hell. Indeed, in an especially callous burlesque of Federalists’ bereavement, one character petitions the recently deceased Hamilton to return from “below” and inform his allies whether they will find refuge in hell: “Go, ALEX, mid the spirits of the brave, / While royal tears, embalm your royal grave, / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ Inform me, by next post (to ease my woe) / If there’s an Aristocracy below!—​­/ Don’t peep above thy bourn, my splendid friend, / New England’s gone—​­our treason’s at an end.”28

254   Chapter 7 If Democracy Unveiled and The Hamiltoniad exemplified a desire to interpret the political present simply in terms of the past, another form of literary retrospection arose at the same moment as a means of making peace with the present. A more sanguine form of retrospective literary warfare is found in the 1807 republication of “The Echo,” some sixteen years after it had first appeared. The decision to publish the pieces as a collection was itself a tacit acknowledgment that the glory days of both generations of Connecticut Wits had passed (indeed, of the original group of “Echo” contributors, only Alsop and Theodore Dwight were still alive). Writing on behalf of the collaborators in the preface, Alsop concedes the literary and political obsolescence of the specific verse parodies, emphasizing their original moment of “literary sportiveness” and reminding readers of the upheavals of the early 1790s in a way that highlights their historical distance. And while Alsop makes sure to point out that the “principles” the “Echo” poets ridiculed have “since produced so much distress and misery to mankind,” he is equally resigned to the fact that he and his fellow Wits were ultimately unsuccessful in “check[ing] the progress of this alarming evil,” taking satisfaction only in the prospect of being remembered for “endeavour[ing] to oppose this destructive torrent.”29 Perhaps in the spirit of offering one last valedictory parody for old time’s sake, Alsop included in the collection a new poem, “The Echo, No. XX,” which took as its subject Jefferson’s second inaugural address, from March 1805. Befitting the strategy that had inspired the original installments of “The Echo” in 1791, the final installment of the series mimics Jefferson’s language closely, deviating only to more fully expound on various perceived instances of ideological deception. Thus, for instance, in the opening of the “speech,” the fictional Jefferson departs from the actual Jefferson’s words to candidly admit that the gesture ­toward bipartisanship from his previous inaugural—​ “­We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans”—​­had been nothing but a “soothing song,” designed to “lull suspicion” among wary Federalists.30 Yet if such a move calls to mind the overarching argument of Democracy Unveiled that the hidden truths of Jeffersonian Democracy yet lay waiting to be exposed, other moments in the parody communicate a more nuanced understanding of the political landscape in 1807. The most remarkable of these moments focuses on the passage from Jefferson’s inaugural in which he outlines his policy ­toward Native Americans in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase. In the process of presenting the policy itself, and the president’s true motives, as part of the same civilizing fantasy that

The Triumph of Democracy   255 had earlier been used to justify American encroachment on Indian lands, Alsop uses this critique to comment as well on the fundamental ideological division separating Federalists from Democrats, and the problem this division would pose for Federalism in the coming years. In the original speech, Jefferson had emphasized his “commiseration” with the “aboriginal inhabitants” of Louisiana, a people, he states, “Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men” who have been “overwhelmed” by the “stream of overflowing population from other regions”: “Reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter’s state, humanity enjoins to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society, which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals. We have therefore liberally furnished them with the implements of husbandry and household use.” In response, the parodied Jefferson of “The Echo” makes a similar claim of sympathy, albeit in more hyperbolically sentimental ­language—​­“At their sad story oft We’ve felt Our breast / With soft compassion’s throbbing pangs ­opprest”—​­and, as in the original speech, follows with a version of the same proposed solution of furnishing Native Americans with the means of transforming their culture and economy from being based on hunting to being based on agriculture. This proposal of modernization leads in “The Echo” to a portrait of Jefferson as so preoccupied with civilizing Indians that he insists on showering them with all the advancements of the nineteenth-​­century American home—​­whether the Indians want them or not: Humanity has whisper’d in Our ear Whose dictates ever have We held most dear, To teach them how to spin, to sew, to knit, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We therefore liberally to them have sent Such household matters as for use are meant, Pots, kettles, trenchers, dripping-​­pans, whate’er Their kitchens lack, their victuals to prepare, And with them skillful men to teach them how To still their whisky[,] their tobacco grow.31 If this scene of domestic bliss brings to mind, on the one hand, the image of Jefferson as the voice of simple agrarian republicanism, its emphasis on

256   Chapter 7 modernization reminds readers of Jefferson as he more often appeared in his own time, as a tenacious advocate of modernity. This is a figure who defines civilization almost solely as material advancement, and who treats the idea of preserving tradition—​­which Native American leaders would persist in defending against the force of Jefferson’s policies—​­as nothing more than holding onto outmoded superstitions. This point is articulated by Jefferson in the address, as well as by his fictional counterpart in “The Echo.” As Jefferson himself puts it, despite the “endeavors to enlighten them on the fate which awaits their present course of life, to induce them to . . . ​change their pursuits,” numerous obstacles stand in the Indians’ way. Among them, he goes on to say, are “the habits of their bodies, prejudice of their minds, ignorance, pride, and the influence of interested and crafty individuals” who “inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors” and advise their people that “reason is a false guide, and to advance under its counsel . . . ​is perilous innovation.” In “The Echo,” however, this same warning against the perils of being drawn to outmoded ideologies allows for an unmasking of Jefferson’s Enlightenment faith as itself rooted in an ideology that mystifies by way of its very claim to demystify. The parodied Jefferson begins by indulging his Enlightenment fantasy of Native Americans awakening en masse from their ideological slumber in language directly evoking French Revolutionary images of peasants throwing off the yoke of despotism: “Thrice happy time; when, freed from Error’s night, / Reason’s broad beam shall shed her mid-​­day light, / O’er realms regenerate ope unbounded day, / And bless the Indians with its brightest ray.” Then, following the standard theory of the threat of counterenlightenment (which is also prominent in the original address), the fictional Jefferson warns against those who stand in the way of reason and progress. Yet most remarkable about this “Echo” is that it becomes clear over the course of this warning that Jefferson is speaking not only about the Natives’ resistance to enlightenment and change but also about a similar resistance by his political opponents: For ah! among them live some crafty dogs, Change-​­haters, anti-​­philosophic rogues, Chaps who, though something, are of nothing made, Mere forms of air and phantoms of the shade: Who say ’tis better in the ancient way

The Triumph of Democracy   257 Safe to go on, than in new paths to stray, Where bogs and precipices lurk beneath, And ignes fatui point the way to death.32 Beyond its humanitarian critique of Jefferson’s Indian policy, which, like the Connecticut Wits’ earlier satires during the Miami wars, anticipates the broader resistance by Northeastern writers and intellectuals against the Indian removal policies of the Jacksonian era, this passage provides a crucial clue to understanding the Federalist perspective on the ideology of Enlightenment progressivism that informed Jefferson’s presidency. One of the enduring themes in the scholarship on the Federalist mind-​­set after 1800 is its insistence that the political divisions of the time could be reduced largely to a choice between innovation and tradition, whether that meant defending Christian orthodoxy against secularism or honoring the wisdom of the ancients against the new philosophical theories of Paine and Godwin. What “The Echo, No. XX,” brings into focus in this context is the degree to which Federalists understood their own potential political demise in terms analogous to their understanding of the plight of Native Americans. Indeed, the Connecticut Wits’ long-​­standing defense of Indian territorial rights can be seen in this context as part of a common protest against the threat of modernity to traditional culture. Thus, at the end of his rendering of Jefferson’s warning against the enemies of progress, Alsop draws an explicit connection between Federalists and Indians as mutual victims of Jefferson’s deceptive understanding of reason and equality. For among the Native American “change-​ ­ haters” whom the parodied Jefferson derides as stubbornly resisting the advances of progress are those who warn That what the whites the light of reason call Is but another name for cheating all, And that by equal rights is meant, ’tis plain, The right by force or fraud whate’er they list to gain. Thus like the Feds to reason they pretend Suspect Our motives, and decry Our end.33 The final installment of “The Echo” thus exemplifies retrospective poetry in the broadest sense of the word, insisting that Americans would be wise to look

258   Chapter 7 back to the wisdom of the past rather than rush headlong into an undreamt-​­of world of social and political change. At the same time, as the valedictory utterance of a poet fully aware that his ideological moment has passed, it is consciously retrospective in a way that Democracy Unveiled and The Hamiltoniad are not. Perhaps for this reason the publication of The Echo, With Other Poems was met with both approbation and faint praise from Federalist-​­leaning publications that were themselves divided over the role satirists should play in the age of Jefferson. For those who shared Fessenden’s preference for urgent, all-​­out literary warfare, such as the reviewer from the Monthly Register, Magazine, and Review of the United States, the “Echo” series could be praised for its “airy ridicule” of Jefferson and his political allies. Yet, he would add darkly, “Airy ridicule is, in very deed, an uneffectual weapon against the murderous desolation of jacobinism, which shakes up all public security, and threatens all private enjoyments.”34 At the other end of the spectrum stood a coterie of New York writers—​ ­ ashington Irving, his brother William, and his brother-​­in-​­law James Kirke W Paulding—​­who had lately begun publishing a very different kind of magazine, Salmagundi; or, the Whim-​­Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others. For these young wits, The Echo, With Other Poems was commendable precisely for the style and tone that the reviewer in the Monthly Review had damned with faint praise. When the surviving “Echo” authors sent the book along to the proprietors of the new magazine, with a card expressing the “pleasure they have received from [the Salmagundi group’s] cervantic effusions,” the latter saw fit to advertise the gesture as a sign that this earlier generation of satirists had symbolically passed their literary torch to a new one: “We publish with pride the following card from the authors of ‘THE ECHO,’ a work which we have commended to a conspicuous post in our library; and we do hereby shake its authors by the hand as a set of right merry wags, choice spirits, and what we think better than all, genuine humorists.” Such a tribute is important not because one of Salmagundi’s collaborators would go on to later literary fame as America’s foremost humorist but for what the magazine signified in the context of literary Federalism in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Despite the magazine’s self-​­conscious reversal of priorities in relation to earlier Federalist-​­leaning publications—​­giving greater emphasis to antic humor and social satire than to political satire as such—​­Salmagundi was nevertheless recognized by its peers as Federalist in a cultural, if not explicitly political, sense. Indeed, as Joseph Dennie noted

The Triumph of Democracy   259 during the brief craze generated by the appearance of Salmagundi, there was a clear kinship between this new magazine and the Port Folio.35 In tacitly rejecting literary-​­political warfare, moreover, Salmagundi heralded a new mode of “cultural” Federalism that would characterize other literary magazines, such as the Monthly Anthology and the North American Review. Yet just as important, it signaled the death throes of the more conspiratorial variety of anti-​­Jacobin discourse that had outlasted its moment—​­thanks, in part, to poets like Thomas Green Fessenden. Indeed, this development too would play out in the pages of Salmagundi, when, in response to the magazine’s first issue, Fessenden printed a brief review in the New York Weekly Inspector suggesting that the new magazine was long on style but short on substance. Playing on the culinary connotation of “salmagundi,” he wrote, “Pray, Messrs. Caterers of Salmagundi, give us a little . . . ​plain plum pudding, if you have it at hand. But, in the name of all the gods of gormandizing, spare us your whipped syllabub [curdled milk mixed with wine], if you have nothing but flummery [flour porridge] to substitute.”36 Fessenden likely regretted the jab, because it was soon featured as the subject of a satiric poem by William Irving, aptly entitled “Flummery,” which took Fessenden to task for both his patronizing review and his own attempts at political satire. Self-​­consciously referencing Fessenden’s proclivity for copious footnotes in the poem’s subtitle—​­“Being a Poem with Notes, or rather Notes with a Poem, in the manner of Doctor Christopher Costive”—​­Irving ridicules Fessenden for precisely the sort of satiric “gibbeting” of his enemies that dominates Democracy Unveiled. “Christopher Costive” (whose revised pseudonym called to mind both slowness and constipation) writes in a poor imitation of Hudibras: “Who drags like snail his filthy slime, / Through many a ragged hobbling rhyme, / Then calls his billingsgate—​­sarcastic! / His drabbling doggerel—​­hudibrastic!” But in representing himself as Federalism’s satiric “hangman” or executioner, he engages in a form of literary scurrility that demonstrates his deeper similarity with one of his most despised satiric ­enemies—​­“Tony Pasquin,” the author of The Hamiltoniad—​­and in the process damages the Federalist cause all the more: The greatest poet of our day, From State of Maine to Louisiana; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

260   Chapter 7 Who rear’d a gallows for each elf, and Did for hangman his own self stand, And made folks think it very odd, he Should turn Jack Ketch to every body—​­ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who gibbeted the knaves so knowing, That kept Democracy a going, Hung his fac-​­simile famed Toney Pasquin, the friend of Mr. Honeé.37 For this younger generation of urbane wags, whose magazine foreshadowed the broader depoliticization of Federalist culture after 1815, Fessenden’s poetic failure lay not merely in the dearth of “genuine humor” they had found in the “Echo” poems but also in his lack of awareness of the political and ideological reality that Alsop and the poets of the Port Folio group had acknowledged in different ways. What the ridicule of Fessenden in the pages of Salmagundi ultimately signified was that the very ground of satiric warfare had shifted, no longer pitting Federalists like “Christopher Caustic” against Republicans like “Anthony Pasquin” but relegating both to the category of literary-​­political nostalgia. In their place was a new group of clear-​­eyed poets who, regardless of their political leanings, understood that in a very real sense the poetry wars of the early republic were coming to an end. This end remained years away—​­indeed, as we shall see in the following section, the Embargo Act and the War of 1812 would temporary revive both the practice of tit-​­for-​­tat political exchanges and the electoral hopes of the Federalist Party. Yet in ridiculing poetic warfare as it had been waged from the Revolution to the election of 1800, Irving’s satire of Fessenden would signal the decline of a cultural practice that had seemed, only a few years earlier, an important and permanent feature of American political discourse.

Embargo, War, and the Return of Literary War Until relatively recently, the political fortunes of the Federalist Party during Jefferson and Madison’s presidencies have been interpreted as part of a longer narrative of inexorable decline wherein, with each ensuing election, Federalists watched their numbers in Congress dwindle until the party as a whole ceased to be anything more than a tiny, regional minority. Nor is this

The Triumph of Democracy   261 surprising, because, as we have seen, Federalists and Republicans at the time embraced versions of this narrative: voices on both sides of the political divide viewed the outcome as a harbinger of the party’s eventual, permanent demise. Republican balladeers responded with triumphant hymns celebrating the age of Jefferson as a dawning era of liberty and equality, while despondent Federalists mourned the loss of America’s true “self ” or looked back on the 1790s as a time when they could still contest the claim to represent the voice of the people. Yet however final this outcome might have appeared to the key participants at the time, recent evidence on election returns suggest that this declension narrative, while accurately predicting the party’s eventual demise, is far less accurate for the period between 1808 and 1816. For in the eight years corresponding to Madison’s presidency, Federalists enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity—​­not enough to win a presidential election or gain a majority in Congress, to be sure, but enough to expand their numbers considerably in the House of Representatives and reclaim legislative majorities in several states. This reversal of fortune, Philip Lampi argues, was the result of renewed efforts, particularly by second-​­generation Federalists, to organize the party, contest more open seats, and take advantage of opportunities afforded by “the public’s reaction to pertinent issues.”38 To this list we might add that Federalist poets and balladeers revived the practice of engaging in literary warfare in direct response to such “pertinent issues.” And the most pertinent issue by far, during Jefferson’s final year in office and for most of Madison’s first term, was the Embargo Act of 1807, which inspired numerous public protests, including many in the form of verse and song. Passed in response to a standoff between the United States and Britain over the practice of impressment of American sailors by the British Navy, the Embargo Act was intended to compel Britain to honor American maritime rights by effectively suspending trade, not only with Britain but with all foreign nations. Proposed by Jefferson as a “candid and liberal experiment” on the question of whether America could impose its will on belligerent nations without resorting to war, the embargo proved disastrous in practice: while shrinking the American economy considerably, it actually enriched Britain by yielding to the empire a greater share of the West Indian–European trade. As such effects of the policy took hold in America in the spring and summer of 1808, the reaction was unsurprisingly political: in Federalist-​­leaning New England states, citizen groups petitioned the president to repeal the law, and when such petitions failed, they advocated civil disobedience and, occasionally, even secession.

262   Chapter 7 Entire regions along the U.S.-​­Canadian border carried on what was suddenly deemed an illegal trade, forcing Jefferson to order the formation of militia units to quell the burgeoning insurrection.39 Against this backdrop of economic crisis and political disunity, the elections of 1808 were dominated by a sustained Northeastern campaign against Jefferson and the Republican majority. As with earlier examples of the intersection of political activism and literary production, the campaign was accompanied by a corresponding explosion of songs and poems about the embargo, such that during the same months in which the respective parties were organizing their campaigns, poets and balladeers were flooding the pages of partisan newspapers with verses and songs decrying or defending the embargo. For a time, at least, the literary public sphere resembled the dynamic of poetic tit for tat and apparent political parity of the 1790s. For Federalist wits, the embargo was not simply an ill-​­conceived policy but a confirmation of their earlier campaign against Jefferson’s presidency as a whole, particularly his perceived fondness for “speculative” Enlightenment theories. Indeed, the underlying logic of the embargo was rooted in an abstract formula, going back at least to Adam Smith, which held that commercial markets, by providing for the mutual benefits to diverse nations, had the potential to render war unnecessary. As Jefferson’s friend Joel Barlow argued in The Columbiad—​­which appeared in the same year the Embargo Act was passed—​­“Commerce triumphs o’er the rage of war” by making plain the extent to which war contradicts a nation’s rational self-​­interest. By the same reasoning, the withholding of commerce could convince a rival nation of the need to negotiate a mutually agreeable trade compact without ever having to resort to bloodshed. Federalist embargo poems responded to such logic by contrasting the expectations of the “philosophers” who dreamed up the theory of the embargo with the concrete hardships caused by the cessation of trade: “But now our ships they are unrigg’d, / Our sailors spin street-​­yarn, sir—​­/ Our merchants fail—​­our farmers sigh—​­/ Their grain lies in the barn, sir.”40 This is not to say that the poems and songs attacking the embargo as an ideological theory, contrary to common sense, were not themselves i­ deological—​ ­indeed, they were highly ideological, particularly with regard to what we have called the ideology of form. Most antiembargo verses were songs, and most employed common stylistic and thematic elements, such that their appearance in the summer of 1808 constituted a generic vogue, the “embargo song,” in its own right. Besides communicating popular unity through group public perfor-

The Triumph of Democracy   263 mance, embargo songs made especial use of the repetition and resolution of the refrain to emphasize a sense of common commiseration over the effects of the embargo. The very word “embargo” lent itself to a lilting anapestic meter that resolved on the word or its rhyme, creating a tone of shared comic sympathy as the singer described the myriad ways the people were suffering under the policy. In one oft-​­reprinted example, “The Embargo—​­A Song,” the singer addresses the issue of tone in a tongue-​­in-​­cheek way, drawing the audience into a mood of weary irritation—​­“I wish that I could / Sing in Allegro mood; / But the times are as stupid as Largo”—​­before voicing what would become a familiar critique found in numerous embargo songs: Our great politicians, Those dealers in visions, On paper, to all lengths they dare go; But when call’d to decide, Like a turtle they hide, In their own pretty shell the EMBARGO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our ships all in motion Once whiten’d the ocean, They sail’d and return’d with a Cargo; Now doom’d to decay They have fallen a prey To Jefferson, worms, and EMBARGO.41 Whether the form’s popularity arose from its rhythmic and aural appeal or its capacity to channel, in a lighthearted way, the vulnerability experienced by those whose livelihoods depended on trade, the song spawned countless imitations and parodies during the period when the effects of the cessation of trade were most keenly felt. In addition to reproducing the verse form and rhyme scheme of the original, such songs evoked similar motifs, from the speaker’s exasperation over the sheer self-​­destructiveness of allowing cargo to rot in warehouses, to the blame placed on “politicians” for conjuring up such impractical “visions” in the first place. Indeed, the contrast between politicians far removed from the consequences of their abstract scheme and those who directly experienced the hardships of the embargo accounts for the recurrent motif found in several antiembargo songs, of writing in the voice of an

264   Chapter 7 honest but plainspoken “American tar,” who complains that he and his fellow sailors are forced to sit and wait “on the lee shore” with nothing in sight “but wreck and starvation.” In direct contrast to the broader cultural tendency to identify the Western frontier states with the ideal of the common man, the sailor-​­speaker in such songs assumes the mantle of the vox populi and blames the crisis on politicians from landlocked states like Kentucky who set policy for maritime Northeastern states even though they lack the seaman’s ability to “steer” the ship of state: WHAT cheer, my dear Jack?

What a damnable crack This Embargo has made in our nation! We are all on lee shore, And what is still more, We see nothing, but wreck and starvation: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By Jove ’tis unlucky—​­ These Clowns from Kentucky Will soon send us all, to old Davy’s Locker. But curse those land-​­lubies, And other great boobies, Who wish to command the helm of our nation; They can’t hand, reef or steer, And their reck’ning we fear, Who all keep such a damn’d calculation.42 Owing to the popularity of such songs among critics of the administration, the form spawned nearly as many parodies and retorts by Republican balladeers who took it upon themselves to defend the policy. Yet for the writers of such responses, the prospect of defending the embargo in verse or song meant giving voice to positions that seemed to oppose many of the fundamental values of Jeffersonian Republicanism: against various Federalists’ appeals to hardships suffered by the common people, pro-​­embargo poets were forced to argue in favor of treating the wisdom of elected leaders with due deference. At least one such ballad, signed under the pseudonym “Rusticus” (no doubt to underscore the poet’s bona fides as a simple American farmer), attempted such a feat: “ ’Tis good for a freeman to know and discern, / The hinge upon which public

The Triumph of Democracy   265 measures may turn,” the song begins, before reminding readers of the need to maintain a reasonable “distance” when criticizing public policy. Yet try as Rusticus might, the closest he could come to explaining the wisdom of the embargo was to repeat a sort of catechism at the end of each verse explaining Jefferson’s original logic for instituting the policy: “Does any man ask what embargo be for? / Embargo is reason in lieu of a war.”43 Perhaps to avoid the ideological confusion between the contradictory rhetorical requirements of defending the embargo, on the one hand, and the Republican Party’s long-​­standing belief in limited government, on the other, most pro-​­embargo poets opted not to defend the policy in positive terms. Rather, they turned the criticism back onto its critics, labeling them complainers—​ “­ knaves and fools” who argue that “every ill the people feel / Is owing to The Embargo”—​­or worse, Tories and traitors. In one of several parodies of “The Embargo—​­A Song,” the speaker warns that even if such writers succeed in portraying the embargo with “as much falsehood as they ‘can let spare go,’ ” the truth remains that Federalists cannot be trusted to criticize American policy objectively because their loyalties lie not with their own people but with Britain: “How warmly they ‘try to put out’ Freedom’s ‘eye,’—​­/ Ah! yes; and they’d have the whole ‘pair go’: / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ For our country so dear, they have ‘nothing to fear,’ / For Britain’s their land, and they’d ‘there go.’ ”44 One of the most powerful means of defending the embargo, while representing its critics as weak or disloyal, was to inscribe the policy, and the maritime conflict that preceded it, in language evoking the memory of the American Revolution. This strategy was given ultimate expression, perhaps, in the “Song Of spunky Jonathan, who, from the walls of Lexington road fired away all his ammunition, and then threw stones!” As this remarkable title illustrates, the song’s ideological power arose from its withering comparison between the Revolutionary generation’s willingness to face hardship and the reaction of “snivelling coxcombs” who would gladly “sell for a sixpence, their freedom,” and who now “seize the pen” to “whine” about the embargo. Especially brilliant about this stratagem was its capacity to undercut the “reality vs. ideology” argument of antiembargo songs by defining patriotism, as symbolized by the Revolution, as a virtue greater than realism itself. As “spunky Jonathan” puts it, those who stick by their country in supporting the embargo are acting not with their “own pockets” in mind but with a conviction that their true interests are ultimately aligned with “the public advantage.” Beyond this, Jonathan reminds the younger generation of what hardship entailed: “When

266   Chapter 7 hungry I’ve fought, and when naked I’ve toil’d / For Freedom, the greatest of treasures; / No hardships could move me when Liberty smil’d, / I laugh’d at effeminate pleasures.” Lest such effeminate whiners persist in their selfish complaints, he adds, they might recall that “In those times when tories appeal’d to our wants, / We soon did for feathers and tar go.”45 The appeal of Revolutionary War symbolism accounts as well for the proliferation, throughout the crisis, of variations on the “Yankee Doodle” song, which, in the case of songs defending the embargo, appealed to a similar ideal of national pride and individual self-​­sacrifice—​­“Should sullen powers refuse to treat, / If e’er they dare so far go, / We hog, and hominy can eat / Throughout a long Embargo”—​­while accusing those who “cavil at Embargo” of cowardice and disloyalty. In response, the “Yankee Doodle” form was also invoked by critics of the embargo, though in these cases the ideology of the form employed was decidedly more complex. On the one hand, such songs deflected the charge of effeminacy by arguing that even outright war was preferable to the fetters of economic inactivity, but, importantly, the putative enemy in such martial appeals was more often Napoleonic France, which, as Federalists consistently argued, was the unacknowledged beneficiary of the embargo: “Rub up, my lads, your drowsy eyes, / And see those Frenchmen rot ’em! / Our ships they force in flames to rise, / Or sink them to the bottom.” Equally important in Federalist versions of the “Yankee Doodle” song was the tendency to redefine the Yankee Doodle persona itself as a symbol not of a unified American republic but of New England in particular, further reinforcing the sectional loyalties that would inform so many subsequent political conflicts: Whatever southern folks may think Of these commercial fetters, New-​­England’s hardy sons can’t drink Such stomach-​­aching bitters. Yankee Doodle—​­loose the wheels, Let us be preparing; No longer tie us neck and heels, To struggle thus despairing.46 Against such suggestions as this one, that continuing the embargo policy amounted to avoiding the harder choice over whether to go to war (and with

The Triumph of Democracy   267 whom), some Republican balladeers responded by arguing that the embargo already constituted a form of warfare—​­first, because it required a similar spirit of sacrifice and, second, because it could be interpreted as an act of imposing the will of the United States within the ongoing tripartite imperial conflict with both Britain and France. Thus, complicating the argument that the embargo represented an alternative to war, a number of poems portrayed the embargo in decidedly muscular terms. In one poem that appeared before the law even went into effect, the speaker predicts that by “break[ing] off . . . ​ trade” with “tyrants,” America will emerge as a more commanding world power: “Independent we stand / In a free happy land, / And the world we’ll command, / For the voice of EMBARGO the world must obey.”47 Even after the Embargo Act was repealed, the notion that America could wield power by refusing to trade with Britain or France would continue to hold sway, as the newly elected Madison would begin his term by pursuing a more limited policy of nonintercourse with Britain and France, while offering trade agreements to either empire provided they revoke their own restrictions on American neutral commerce. This tension between praising commercial nonintercourse as a peaceful measure, while simultaneously engaging in bellicose rhetoric, would become a common feature in poems and songs supporting Madison during the period immediately prior to the War of 1812. Thus, for instance, in yet another example of the Yankee Doodle motif, one singer declares that Americans are eager to avenge British offenses—​­“To war we go beyond all doubt / Or they must make concessions”—​­while also suggesting, in somewhat tortured logic, that America has already engaged the enemy by refusing to trade with it: Our government’s pacific turn Preferring trade and freedom, Has made John Bull with rancor burn For fear we should exceed ’em[.] Immolestations we exact In home and foreign commerce, Hence for the Non importation act They threaten now to warm us.48 Yet if such bellicose rhetoric contributed to a somewhat muddled Republican message during the embargo and nonimportation debates—​­arguing that

268   Chapter 7 such laws were both an alternative to war and a form of warfare in and of ­itself—​­as tensions with Britain continued to escalate, the same rhetoric provided Republican poets and balladeers with a seamless transition into calling for outright war: “Come strike the bold anthem, the war dogs are howling, / Already they eagerly snuff up their prey; / The red cloud of war o’er our forests is scowling, / Soft peace spreads her wings and flies weeping away.” Such calls for war, in turn, opened the way for even more explicit comparisons to 1775, with references to “The spirits of Washington, Warren, Montgomery” gazing down from heaven and rejoicing in America’s revived martial spirit. In concert with pro-​­war slogans like “Sailor’s Rights” and “Free Ships and Free Goods,” such allusions as this reminded younger Americans that the republic had been created out of a similar willingness to defend to the death the rights and liberties that were now at risk, and would remain at risk as long as the United States remained subject to British humiliation on the high seas.49 Besides suggesting that the reasons for waging a second war with Britain were virtually the same as the causes of the Revolution, references to the patriotic spirit of ’75 served the additional purpose of countering the regional and partisan disunity that had only intensified in the years following the embargo crisis. For Republican poets at the beginning of the decade, we may recall, one of the great promises of Jefferson’s presidency was the prospect of an end to the ideological warfare that had divided Americans during the 1790s. Yet the embargo and nonintercourse controversies, followed by the antagonism between Republican war hawks and Federalist opponents, posed the most significant threat to federal unity since the Constitution. Against this backdrop, the prospect of mass mobilization against a common enemy—​­ whether through nonimportation or war—​­provided the best hope for, in the words of one Fourth of July poem, the creation of an American “empire of freedom” that was, unlike the recent past, “Unsullied by faction.” This is the context in which Madison’s declaration of war in June 1812 would become, as Nicole Eustace has recently argued, “a test of the strength and meaning of patriotism in a nation torn by sectional and political factionalism,” with Republican poetry in particular serving the purpose of enforcing loyalty among a divided public: “Unite and side by side, / Meet vict’ry or your graves, / That moment WE IN WAR DIVIDE, / That moment WE ARE SLAVES.”50 Even as pro-​­administration balladeers portrayed support for the war as an obligatory aspect of American patriotism or national identity, Federalists responded with poems that, to varying degrees, seemed to invite their oppo-

The Triumph of Democracy   269 nents to call their loyalty into question. One subset of Federalist antiwar verse, which began to appear even before the outbreak of the war itself, advanced an antiwar argument that implicitly subordinated patriotism to a very different conception of group loyalty, in this case, to a moral community whose membership transcended national boundaries. Such poems differed from the antiwar arguments of Federalist political leaders in an important respect: whereas the latter limited their criticism to Madison’s specific war strategy (arguing, for instance, that he was rushing into a war for which the American forces were not prepared), a significant body of antiwar verse in Federalist newspapers condemned the evils of waging war under any circumstances. Thus, for instance, in the poem “Ode to War,” which accurately warned that the embargo might prove to be an opening salvo in a larger, more violent conflict, the speaker addresses the figure of “War” in grotesque terms—​­“Dread offspring of Tartarean birth / Whose nodding crest is stain’d with gore”—​­before commanding the spirit to Avaunt from fair Columbia’s shore; There let thy yells be heard no more, Nor bid thy crimson banners fly, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At length the work of Slaughter close, And give to Europe’s sons repose; Bid the hoarse clangours of the trumpet cease, And smooth thy wrinkled front to meet the smiles of PEACE.51 As indicated in the movement of this passage from “fair Columbia’s shore” to the slaughter suffered by “Europe’s sons,” the poem’s antiwar message extends far beyond the specific question of whether the United States ought to wage war over impressments or seizures of its vessels. Rather, the poem approaches the subject from an emphatically transnational perspective, expressing a broader sense of weariness, after more than a decade of the imperial wars that had originated between Britain and France in the early days of the French Revolution and had since spilled over into the rest of Europe during Napoleon’s conquests, as well as to the United States during the quasi-​­war of 1798 and the embargo crisis. This is the same war-​­weariness that would inspire the international peace movement after 1816, with various peace societies forming in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Yet in the decade prior to this

270   Chapter 7 development, with the final stage of the Napoleonic Wars raging in Europe and the War of 1812 in North America, antiwar activists on both sides of the Atlantic—​­many of them poets—​­would join together in a common endeavor to expose the utter destructiveness and irrationality of war. In this latter context, antiwar poems such as “Ode to War,” though published almost exclusively in Federalist newspapers, presented themselves not as political but as moral works, on a topic not of national but of transnational import. Indeed, poems such as this one appeared alongside reprints of British works, like this excerpt from a dramatic piece by Hannah More, which appeared in several New England newspapers in 1809: “O War, what art thou; / After the brightest conquests what remains / Of all thy glories! For the vanquish’d, chains! / For the proud victor, what? Alas! to reign / O’er desolated nations!”52 Whether voiced by a British or an American author, such poems insisted that only by wresting one’s viewpoint from the circumstances of a specific military conflict could one glimpse, as if with new eyes, the madness of war. Thus, in another frequently reprinted poem from 1809, “To the Advocates for War,” the speaker addresses American and European political leaders in a way that blurs the distinctions between them and urges them to consider the gruesome effects of surrendering to their selfish ambitions: “O YE who fill the throne of power, / Who speak and millions must obey, / Who reign the monarchs of the hour, / And rise dictators of the day; / Think . . . ​/ . . . ​/ What scenes of agony and death / Await the inharmonious sound.” The message to America’s elected leaders, in particular, is that they wield, if only for an “hour” or a “day,” the same power over life or death as the monarchs and dictators they decry, and accordingly will be judged no less harshly for the horrific consequences of their actions. 53 Such poetry, to be sure, contained a political component in the tacit association of this view with the specific antiwar arguments being advanced by the Federalists. But it couched this suggestion in a language geared more t­oward transcending political divisions, whether between rival parties or rival nations. In so doing, Federalist antiwar poets countered their Republican counterparts’ enforcement of patriotic loyalty with a moral argument that defined patriotism itself as part of the problem. Such arguments as this help explain why, despite the war hawks’ expectations that antiwar sentiment would dwindle when accounts of actual battles began appearing in the press, the War of 1812 would be characterized by an active culture of protest, with poems condemning the war on moral grounds appearing regularly alongside the more predictable flurry of patriotic and

The Triumph of Democracy   271 heroic ballads. Only days after the publication of a ballad celebrating one of the few early successes of the war, Commodore Decatur’s capture of HMS Macedonian—​­“Repair to the sea; / You conq’rers shall be; / And proclaim to the world, that Columbia is free!”—​­another poem, “Horrida Bella!” appeared in the same newspaper, decrying in gory detail “the direful groan, / Of War’s dread carnage, o’er the embattled plain” while questioning the moral and religious implications of continuing to fight: “Tell me, ye sages! where is Mercy fled, / That Justice such a sacrifice demand? / And where RELIGION! too, where does thou tread, / That all so boldly break thy stern command?”54 To be sure, such poems allowed for the possibility that one could be at once patriotic and opposed to the war; yet by fostering a sense of alienation ­toward the actions of one’s government or armed forces, they nevertheless opened space for more radical and politically perilous responses by poets who dared to engage with the unfolding narrative of the war in the form of topical satire. Indeed, in the wake of a string of American setbacks in the early days of the war, some poets openly ridiculed the haplessness of their country’s military forces. In some cases, they implicitly justified their satire as consistent with their loyalty, limiting their criticism to the specific decisions of Republican leaders: “Our chiefs beginning late and choosing long, / Have done at last, like most that do so—​­wrong.” Yet even this approach allowed for a glibly comic assessment of military defeat, as in the same poet’s sarcastic treatment of several costly surrenders in the Northwest campaign: “On what foundations stands our army’s pride, / How just their hopes—​­let Hopkins’ fate decide,” he declares in one stanza, and later adds, “Of other chiefs let other lyres resound; / Relate how Hull subdued Canadian ground!” In a different wartime context, the story of Hull’s surrender of Detroit or of Spur’s Defeat might have been restricted to sentimental ballads mourning the losses and the soldiers slain, and of course, such songs appeared. Yet they appeared alongside another body of poems that responded to American losses in remarkably detached, mock-​­panegyric terms: “My feeble voice no sound like these can try, / The theme too glorious and the key too high.”55 If the latter poem at least gestured ­toward claiming the mantle of a loyal opposition, other topical verses dispensed with this pretense altogether, openly ridiculing the misfortunes of American soldiers in their unsuccessful attempts to control the Northwest Territories. Major General Samuel Hopkins’s defeat at the Battle of Wildcat Creek provided ample fodder for satire because his retreat in the face of a Kickapoo and Shawnee ambush had been precipitated

272   Chapter 7 by an outbreak of viral sickness among the soldiers. Thus in several poems appearing in Federalist papers, Hopkins was commemorated in mock-​ ­ ournful tones for falling victim to a dreaded foe—​­not the British or Indian m forces but the “monster” diarrhea: A gloomier fortune frowned on HOPKINS’ track, Whose skill scarce served to march his warriors back. With hasty step the General leads his powers Where the dread foe, fell Diarrhaea towers. Bold in his strength, the sickly Monster stands, And darts intestine woes, from each his hands. Thro’ every border where his forces go, There strength dissolves, and blood alas must flow! Quick on our force, the unfeeling tyrant sprung, For ten long days, on HOPKINS’ rear he hung.56 To treat such a calamity as an occasion for mockery was not unprecedented in Federalist verse; we may recall, in this context, the Hartford Wits’ ridicule of General St. Clair’s debilitating fit of gout during the Miami Wars of the early 1790s. Yet when compared to the more common practice of accompanying criticism of American war policy with obligatory gestures of allegiance, such a lack of sympathy over the fate of Hopkins and his men is jarring. On the one hand, it helps explain why triumphant Republicans after the war, as well as subsequent generations of historians, would describe Federalist sentiment during the war as bordering on disloyalty, if not outright sedition. Yet, on the other hand, its very appearance attests to the confidence among New England Federalists that their message of regional resistance to a government under increasing Southern and Western influence would be locally well received. Such confidence no doubt stemmed from a shared sense that their antiembargo and antiwar stance represented the will of their people—​­New Englanders primarily, but citizens of other states as well—​­and it was likely buttressed by the Federalists’ electoral resurgence in the years immediately preceding the war. At any rate, such gestures ­toward a Federalist “declaration of ideological independence” from the American republic as it was currently controlled would mark a decisive point in the history of partisan and literary conflict, one in which regional differences, which had always

The Triumph of Democracy   273 tacitly influenced the party wars of the 1790s, would rise to the surface and intensify nearly to the point of political separation.57 Amid accounts of losses suffered by the American forces in the first year of the war, such poems carried considerable ideological weight in reinforcing the argument that the war had been a terrible mistake, and that as a result a permanent political schism had opened between Northeastern objectors and the war hawks of the South and West. Yet by the end of 1813 such arguments were neutralized by a confluence of events and print mediations of those events: as the American forces enjoyed a series of military successes in the Great Lakes, in the defense of Baltimore, and later in New Orleans, poems and ballads linked the heroism of soldiers and sailors to a renewed sense of national unity. To cite only one prominent example, Admiral Perry’s victory in the Battle of Lake Erie inspired at least a dozen distinct songs and poems in 1813 and 1814. These works focused on the symbolic significance of the battle’s many dramatic turns, including Perry’s nearly being killed by a cannonball, desperately trying to plug a hole in his sinking ship with his coat, and taking command of the vessel sent to rescue him and leading the remaining fleet to victory: “O had you been there, I vow and declare, / That so great a sight you’d ne’er see before, / Six or eight bloody flags no longer could wag, / All laid at the feet of our brave commodore.” The sheer number and ubiquity of such ballads effectively drowned out the antiwar message with their positive message of heroism and patriotism. At the same time, other Republican poems, including a significant number of satiric New Year’s verses, advanced a corresponding satiric strategy of recasting Federalist antiwar sentiment as a form of treason: Old Eighteen hundred twelve is gone: While in its past eventful flight, Important things have come to light: With many unexpected wonders, Of Tory tricks and federal blunders. See, lab’ring hand in Britain’s cause, Against their Country and its Laws.58 Accusations that Federalists harbored a secret allegiance to Britain were hardly new, but after 1814 such charges would seem to many Republicans as

274   Chapter 7 having been confirmed when twenty-​­six prominent Federalists, prompted by widespread popular opposition to the war throughout New England, organized the Hartford Convention as a mechanism for petitioning the federal government to address the concerns of those states. Though a few of the delegates argued in favor of seceding from the federal union and negotiating a separate peace with Britain, the convention’s leaders ultimately opted for the more moderate course of passing a series of resolutions to be brought before the president and Congress. Yet this was not enough to prevent the delegates, and the New England Federalists as a whole, from being tainted as traitors for taking part in the endeavor. That the planned presentation of the convention’s report to Congress in February of 1815 coincided with the news of Andrew Jackson’s victory in New Orleans and the ratification of the treaty formally ending the war only exacerbated the Federalists’ embarrassment and ensured that Republican celebrations of the war’s conclusion would also include burlesque retellings of the Hartford debacle: And who are these, of dismal phiz Whom the blue devils seem to teaze—​­ Who, ’midst this universal mirth, Wander, as outcasts, o’er the earth? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And have you not, by many a songster, Been told of a three-​­headed monster, Resembling neither beasts nor men, That once in HARTFORD had its den? This hag, unmatch’d upon the earth, Died, in the act of bringing forth Amendments to the Constitution, And many a shapeless Resolution.59 Though the immediate purpose of this poem was to commemorate the end of the War of 1812, in a crucial sense this passage may also be said to mark a definitive end to both the political struggles of the first party system and the poetry wars that had accompanied them since the early 1790s. In representing the members of the antiwar contingent as utterly inept in their attempts to influence the federal government, Republican poets forced Federalists, once again, to concede their party’s loss of political power; and unlike

The Triumph of Democracy   275 their earlier electoral losses during Jefferson’s first term, this loss would prove permanent. At the same time, by defining the actions and utterances of many Federalists as un-​­American—​­as dismal outcasts wandering the earth without a country—​­Republicans created the conditions by which many Federalists, eager to distance themselves from the taint of disloyalty, would attempt to join in the celebrations. Nowhere is this more evident than in the New Year’s verse for January 1816 in the Columbian Centinel—​­the same newspaper that had, only a few years earlier, openly mocked American military defeats. The poem’s expansive title clearly illustrates the joy and relief felt by Federalist Bostonians at the news that the war was over: A Year of jubilee: The carriers of the Columbian Centinel, with the kindest wishes of the day, congratulate their patrons—​­on the restoration of peace to the whole world:—the revival of commerce, and the mechanic arts:—the return of good times to industry and enterprise . . . ​; and the general enjoyment of health and prosperity. Beyond this, the poem conveys a desire—​­somewhat remarkable, given the extreme partisanship of earlier New Year’s verses—​­that the two parties move beyond their past quarrels. To be sure, there is an attempt by the speaker to save face by suggesting that in hastily attempting to “patch up a peace” without insisting on any of the conditions that had led to the war in the first place, Madison had simply come around to the Federalists’ position. But this gesture is offset by the poem’s concluding sentiment suggesting that it was time for the party to come to terms with the fact that the United States would be ruled by Republicans—​ m ­ ore specifically, Virginians—​­for the foreseeable future. “Let the War pass,” the speaker implores, before expressing the hope that “they who give us rules” have benefited from having learned from their mistakes: If they regard the general weal—​­ To Commerce if they give the rein, Nor with Embargos vex again; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why let them rule! We will not care If old Virginia ten years more Sends Office-​­holders score by score.60 Within the larger story of literary warfare from the time of the Revolution, this passage—​­which epitomizes the Federalist realization of their party’s impending political irrelevance—​­is significant for the way it draws a conclusion, in

276   Chapter 7 the context of the end of the first party system, similar to that reached by Loyalists at the end of the Revolution. Such an analogy may appear strained at first glance: the two parties, after all, had not been at “war” in the same sense as the Patriots and Loyalists; nor did the Federalists of 1815 find themselves in as vulnerable a position as that of the Loyalists of 1783. Yet both groups were marginalized after a long and decisive ideological struggle, and indeed, despondent Federalists were frequently branded by their Republican foes as Tories. Perhaps this is why, in the Centinel poet’s attempt to remain as sanguine as possible in the face of disappointment, one hears the distant echo of post-​­Revolutionary songs like Joseph Stansbury’s “Let Us Be Happy as Long as We Can.” Like those Loyalists who opted to remain in the United States after the Revolution, moreover, a significant number of Federalist poets responded with attempts to join with the other “patriotic” Americans in a new postpartisan era. It is fitting in this context that the well-​­worn phrase used to define the presidency of James Monroe—​­the Era of Good Feelings—​­would first appear in the pages of the Columbian Centinel, in tones as much hopeful as descriptive. Historians have long disagreed on the accuracy of this term to describe the period following the War of 1812; indeed, Federalist poems reflect the full range of responses to the new political landscape, from angry declarations that history will “frown” on Madison’s “frivolous, infamous war” to doleful predictions that the triumphant South and West will demand “Perpetual homage” from their “Eastern vassals.” Yet more often, political poets writing in traditionally Federalist-​­leaning papers expressed a new desire to be part of a united American republic. Thus, for instance, the New Year’s poem for January 1818 in the Salem Gazette, which had earlier printed some of the most pointed criticism of the war, offered a toast and a prayer to President Monroe for his efforts to “set all matters right / And all our honest hearts unite. / Heaven grant he fully may succeed, / And gain the honest patriot’s meed.” Other poems commemorated Monroe’s goodwill tour through New England, taking note of the various occasions in which he was feted by his former political opponents—​­“The Hartford Feds around him cling / All join the hero’s praise to sing”—​­and hailing such meetings as signs of a new “happy day . . . ​/ When all Columbia’s sons might meet; / When each should give his hand to th’other, / With all th’affection of a brother.”61 The Federalist electoral resurgence from 1808 to 1816 corresponded with a large-​­scale reassertion of one of the fundamental claims that poets and balladeers had made since the time of the Stamp Act: that their poetry repre-

The Triumph of Democracy   277 sented the voice of the people. Having all but given up on their earlier efforts to impede the rise of Jeffersonian Democracy through their relentless campaign of literary unmasking, Federalist poets of the embargo period pivoted to a new rhetorical strategy of attacking elite politicians whom they accused of ignoring the plight of ordinary sailors and laborers. In lending their pens to a wave of popular outrage that promised renewed relevance for their party, Federalist poets and songwriters enjoyed a brief period of renewed confidence in the ultimate success of their message, against what they saw as a series of Republican political disasters. Ironically, this very confidence that their staunch antiwar message spoke for the majority of Northeasterners would contribute to their party’s ultimate decline. For it allowed many Federalist leaders to believe that the Hartford Convention, notwithstanding the fact that such an act lay well outside the provisions of the Constitution, was a viable option. The bold detachment with which Federalist poets lampooned American military leaders during a particularly low point in the war, moreover, rested on the assumption that New Englanders were no less detached from a frivolous war drummed up by a Southern and Western contingent whose interests were at odds with the people of their region. Yet as Federalists discovered after 1816, such positions rendered their party vulnerable to the aspect of pro-​­war verse that had always implicitly functioned to arouse patriotic impulses and, by extension, to police disloyal sentiments. Against the backdrop of songs extolling the values of loyalty and sacrifice, news of American victories in Baltimore and elsewhere would render such sacrifices not only heroic and worthwhile but also essential to America’s national identity. (It is fitting, in this context, that Francis Scott Key’s war ballad “The Star-​­Spangled Banner,” or “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” which was reprinted widely in the fall of 1814, would go on to become America’s national anthem.)62 By contrast, literary appeals to sectionalism or economic interest would appear narrow at best and cowardly and unpatriotic at worst. Amid such an ideological environment, the prospect of entering into an era of good feelings, in which former political enemies would put their differences behind them, proved as appealing to Federalists as to Republicans. The Era of Good Feelings provided Federalist poets with an opportunity to represent themselves, once again, as loyal citizens of the United States. Of course, making the most of this second chance would come at the expense of accepting, once and for all, the triumph of Democracy, which earlier generations of Federalist poets had spent decades laboring to prevent.

Epilogue

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M

ost art forms advance the paradoxical claim that their very artificiality, as measured by such elements as form, style, and adherence to convention, nevertheless allows for a faithful and convincing representation of, and engagement with, reality. This was the implicit claim made by political poets during the first half century of American national formation. Though much has been said in these pages about the ideological significance of the act of versification, the majority of the authors analyzed in this book considered themselves more than merely “versifiers”: they saw themselves as poets in the fullest sense of the word. Many nurtured literary aspirations that extended beyond the give-​­and-​­take of poetic warfare, and even when they were penning satires directed against political enemies, they were adhering to a satiric tradition that also included Dryden, Pope, Swift, Churchill, and other celebrated English poets. In bringing this tradition to bear on the political and ideological struggles of their time, moreover, such poets called upon precisely those elements that had long defined poetry as a serious form: its appeal to the senses as well as the emotions; its capacity to cast events within world-​ h ­ istorical narratives; its ability to crystallize wisdom into compact parcels of wit; and its insistence on holding human beings morally accountable for their actions. As we have seen throughout this book, the history of the poetry wars of the American Revolution and early republic is told in the collective body of the poems themselves. First and foremost, it is told in the unspoken decisions of poets (or, more often, groups of poets) to respond to events in specific, ideologically charged forms or genres. But it is also told in explicit reflections

Epilogue   279 of poets on the possibility that their work may successfully intervene in a given political development. In the spontaneous appearance of ­Revolutionary-​ e­ ra versifications and poems of conspiracy, for instance, we glimpse the early confidence of poets in their capacity to subvert imperial authority or expose nefarious schemes by those who sought to oppose the will of the people. We find a similar confidence in the attempts of early Federalist wits to construct a public by projecting through their poetry an ideal audience whose appreciation of wit, urbanity, and aesthetic play made them less likely to be tempted by the putatively extreme political discourses then circulating. And in the careful linguistic attention paid by countless poets to the speeches and writings of Adams and Jefferson and others, we recognize an early example of the still-​­prevalent idea that the words of a politician provide a window into his or her vulnerabilities. Yet if the story of the rise of poetic warfare during the Revolutionary and early republican periods is found in the poems themselves, so is its narrative of decline. One pervasive metadiscourse running through the history of political verse as a whole involves the troubling possibility that poetry or satire will ultimately fail to reverse the course of history. As we saw in particular in Chapter 7, this was a common motif in Federalist poetry after the so-​­called Revolution of 1800. First appearing in what I refer to as the elegiac strain of Federalist verse, this metadiscourse took the form of an intraparty debate among different camps of literary Federalists over whether to doggedly fight on in the face of the Republican ascendancy or to retreat from politics altogether and redirect their poetic energies t­oward moral or aesthetic concerns. After the brief resurgence of literary warfare during the embargo and war crises, Republicans and Federalists alike came to acknowledge that the era of literary warfare had come to an end. Republican balladeers declared that support for the War of 1812 was synonymous with patriotism and American identity itself, and Federalist wits reflexively insisted on their newfound allegiance to President Monroe. Of course, any attempt to declare an end to the poetry wars of the early republic is necessarily conditional, for historical episodes rarely fit neatly into the chronological boundaries we impose on them. Notwithstanding the Era of Good Feelings proclaimed throughout Monroe’s presidency, partisan conflict soon returned to American politics, initially pitting rival factions of Republicans against each other before being codified into a three-​­decade-​­long conflict between Democrats and Whigs. Nor did poets cease their practice of

280   Epilogue weighing in on national or political affairs: even a cursory review of newspaper verse after 1820 reveals that poets and songwriters regularly commented on elections, praised Jackson, Harrison, and Polk, and annually reviewed the events of the previous year in New Year’s verses. Still, the differences between the 1820s and 1790s are difficult to miss. Reflecting a trend in political discourse more broadly, political poetry after 1820 was decidedly less bellicose in both content and tone. Even when partisan tensions reemerged during the Jacksonian era, political poets tended to respond in a more detached manner, reflecting a shared sense that the opposing parties were not separated, as they were believed to be in the 1790s, by vast ideological divisions. This development is most clearly evident in the later history of what we have seen as an important subgenre of political verse during the half century between the Stamp Act crisis and the War of the 1812: the carrier’s address, or New Year’s retrospective, which remained popular throughout the antebellum period. Yet the decades following 1820 witnessed a noticeable decrease in the proportion of New Year’s verses dealing with political topics at all, and among those that did comment on political events such as elections, many treated these contests as less consequential than in earlier decades. Even as historians remember the 1824 election (which was ultimately decided by the House of Representatives in the “Corrupt Bargain”) as a fiercely contested one, the carrier’s address of the American Mercury for January 1825 responded to the uncertainty over who would become president by declaring Adams and Jackson equally acceptable: “If ADAMS or if JACKSON guide/ The helm of state, we’ll safely ride, / And weather ev’ry fearful storm, / Which tyrant’s realm’s [sic] in rage deform.” In addition to avoiding partisan attacks, many carrier’s addresses directed their censure against partisanship itself, as in this New Year’s poem from 1832: “Low as a I am, I will not bend / For party spirit’s voice to blend, / Even in my humble lay. / I hate it in its every form, / Far worse than pestilence or storm / Is its ignoble sway.” This process of depoliticization continued over the ensuing decades, until eventually the genre returned to its pre-​­Revolutionary origins as a creative way for newsboys to solicit their customers for a tip, before disappearing altogether by the end of the nineteenth century.1 Among the genres of political verse that did continue more or less intact for most of the antebellum period was the celebratory ode or song in honor of a candidate or sitting president. Almost every nineteenth-​­century president was the recipient of at least a few such verses, and popular figures like Andrew Jackson were honored repeatedly in literary and musical tributes. Indeed, the

Epilogue   281 presidential hymn, first introduced in Robert Treat Paine’s “Adams and Liberty,” lived on to become an enduring aspect of electoral politics, with poems or songs over the following decades proclaiming “Jackson and Liberty,” “Harrison and Liberty,” “Polk and Liberty,” and “Lincoln and Liberty.”2 Yet this convention, which would endure well into the twentieth century in the form of official political campaign songs such as “I Like Ike,” signifies less a continuation of the underlying poetics of eighteenth-​­century literary warfare than a gradual separation of poetry (as it had been understood in the tradition connecting Pope, Swift, Young, and Churchill to Freneau, Barlow, and the Connecticut Wits) from verse propaganda, which made no such implicit claims to this, or any other, poetic tradition. Looming over this separation, of course, is the literary and philosophical revolution later designated by the term “Romanticism,” which was already under way in Europe in the 1790s, when the poetry wars were at their apex of cultural ubiquity in the United States. The impact of Romanticism on American literary history as a whole is too all-​­encompassing to be summarized here, but insofar as this development touched on the story of American politics, it would involve a shift away from the outward-​­oriented, intertextual poetics that characterized the poetic warfare of the 1790s and earlier, t­oward an ­inward-​­oriented poetics that privileged imagination and originality and conceived of the poet less as a participant in public discourse than as a visionary figure who addressed society from the position of an outsider. The Romantic Revolution helped set in motion as well the longer-​­term development described in my Introduction as the “lyricization of poetry,” in which poetry as a whole came to be defined chiefly according to the conventions of the lyric, and many of the most popular genres of eighteenth-​­century political poetry—​ t­ he mock epic, the Juvenalian “satire of the times,” the verse parody—​­came to be seen as outmoded and even in a certain sense “unpoetic.” That this separation of political verse from the broader conception of poetry was already taking pace in the period after the War of 1812 is neatly encapsulated in the early career of William Cullen Bryant, who, as the author of “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl,” became one the earliest poets from the United States to gain an international reputation. A literary prodigy in his youth, Bryant enjoyed a degree of local fame at an early age by publishing, in 1808, The Embargo, or Sketches of the Times; a Satire. By a Youth of Thirteen. Extending upward of 250 lines, it was one of the longest and most ambitious examples of antiembargo poetry. And as the subtitle, “Sketches of the Times,”

282   Epilogue clearly communicated, the young Bryant understood his poem as belonging to the same Augustan tradition to which so many of his American precursors, from Trumbull to Odell to Benjamin Church, had earlier laid claim. Indeed, Bryant included as his epigram eight lines from Dr. John Brown’s Essay on Satire, which explicitly announced that Bryant considered his satire as poetry, as opposed to mere verse. Yet within a decade, not only was Bryant writing poems that implicitly declared a literary kinship with figures such as Words­ worth and Coleridge, he also came to be (in the words of his biographer) “naturally ashamed” of his early political verse, “both as poems, and as expressions of opinion.”3 In illustrating how his earlier identification with the tradition of Pope, Young, and Churchill would become a source of embarrassment for one who aspired to the mantle of the poet, Bryant’s story marks yet another symbolic conclusion to the era of poetic warfare in America. And yet, when viewed from a slightly different angle, it appears that the practice of engaging in literary-​­political struggle would endure for decades to come. This is the legacy of a body of American poetry and song that, to be sure, engaged with issues of national or political import; yet rather than focus on influencing the outcomes of elections or whipping up party loyalty, this poetry directed its energy to protesting the evils of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans by a U.S. government committed to continuing its westward imperial expansion. Appearing during the prolonged period in which public opinion on such issues tended not to align with the positions of either political party, such poems implicitly divided their audiences by their moral sensibilities and commitment to social reform. This poetry of protest would eventually find its home in the magazines and journals associated with specific social movements, such as the Friend of Peace (the magazine of the Massachusetts Peace Society) and the Liberator. Yet the early emergence of such poetry would coincide closely with the decline of Federalist political verse during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, appearing most frequently in these years in periodicals that had earlier been among the strongest organs of anti-​­Jeffersonian and antiwar sentiment (such as Dennie’s Port Folio, which was one of the leading sources of antislavery verse in the years prior to the War of 1812). The same trend is apparent in the period immediately following the war, as the satiric urgency once invoked in poems of partisan warfare came to be redirected, in the Era of Good Feelings, t­ oward the moral and social injustices that undermined America’s claims to represent liberty or public virtue. “There is a blot upon my country’s fame,” declares the speaker of the 1818

Epilogue   283 poem “Slavery”—​­“a deep and damning stain / That soils the very soul of Liberty; / Pollutes her flag, and dyes her snowy robe, / In human blood.” And even as Americans were universally rejoicing over the end of the war with Britain, some poets were lamenting the fact that the nation continued its aggression against Native Americans. As one such poet suggests, in an ideological atmosphere in which only the voices of the Indians’ oppressors are heard, it is left to poetry alone to give voice to the oppressed: “But while we thus their peace assail, / Who tells the hapless Indian’s tale?—​­/ One side we hear, and all we know / Comes always from the Indian’s foe.”4 The poetry of protest from the early nineteenth century would never completely dispense with addressing issues of government representation. Yet rather than speaking on behalf of politicians representing a single party or political philosophy, as had been the dominant mode in political verse in the 1790s, this poetry would more often be geared ­toward appealing to the collective conscience of political leaders across party lines: “YE LEGISLATORS!” proclaims the speaker of one antislavery poem from 1820, “Throned in the vaulted heart, his dread resort, / Inexecrable CONSCIENCE holds his court; / Hear him, ye SENATORS! hear this truth sublime, / ‘HE WHO ALLOWS OPPRESSION SHARES THE CRIMES.” Nor would this poetry dispense with the vaunted ideal, shared by the political poets of the earlier age, that poetry constituted a viable force for social change. Indeed, the 1827 antiwar poem “Thoughts on Martial Poetry” declares that while “Poetic powers were given with good intent, / To cherish love, and ills of strife prevent,” too often in the modern age have “the charms of verse” been “misapplied, / To praise the works of hate” and “extol a martial rage.”5 Thus would the new poetry of protest offer its own distinction between “poetry” and “verse”—​­one based on moral, rather than aesthetic, values. Such poems as these stand as the literary precursors to the more substantial body of poetry and song that, in the decades leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War, would protest Cherokee removal, the Mexican War, and the expansion of the so-​­called Slave Power. Like the political verse of the Revolutionary and early republican periods, this body of verse would fill the pages of newspapers and magazines, and would contribute to the growing sectional tension in a way that recalled the poetry of resistance from the time of the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts crises. As with eighteenth-​­century American political verse, moreover, this poetry would be penned by some of the most prominent poets of the period, such as Longfellow and Whittier, as well as by

284   Epilogue countless lesser-​­known or anonymous versifiers who conceived their work as an extension of their activism. And like the political verse of the early republic, this later poetry of social reform would range in tone and genre from the solemnly earnest to the satirically comic. In its more somber register, such poetry recalls the elegiac strain of literary Federalism or the understated Freneau of “The American Soldier” in interpreting specific laws or policies as symbolic of a deeper moral or social decline. Thus, for instance, in response to the deceptive and heavy-​­handed tactics of the government officials who negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, ceding all of the Cherokee land to the United States, one poet in the Philadelphia National Enquirer curses America’s empty pretense to public virtue: “That virtue about which we so much rave; / . . . ​/ How blighted is that boasted name to me? / When the defenceless we can crush by power; / As thou are now, poor lonely Cherokee.” Similarly, in response to the passage of the gag rule that effectively silenced the voice of antislavery in the national capital, Whittier calls up the indignant tones of earlier generations of satirists in his “Stanzas for the Times,” demanding an expression of moral outrage that is equal to the moral evil of slavery: “Shall tongues be mute, when deeds are wrought / Which well might shame extremest hell? / . . . ​/ . . . ​/ Shall Honor bleed?—​­shall Truth succumb? / Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb?”6 Yet it is in its ironic register that the nineteenth-​­century poetry of protest most fully reveals its kinship to the poetic warfare of the early republic. This connection comes into focus, for instance, in James Russell Lowell’s “Biglow Papers,” which responded to the recruitment of young men to fight in the Mexican War with the same populist skepticism as that found in Jonathan Pindar’s comic odes or the antiembargo ballads of 1807. In this case, the humble “Yankee” who speaks back to his government on behalf of his fellow farmers and laborers also goes to considerable lengths to reveal the underlying evil of the pro-​­war cause—​­to acquire ever more territory for the expansion of slavery: “They just want this Californy / So’s to lug new slave-​­states in / To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye, / An’ to plunder ye like sin.” And as readers of the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave, may recall, poets would occasionally reach back to the beginning of American political verse and call upon parody to expose, for instance, the argument that slavery was consistent with Christianity. Thus the parody of the hymn “Heavenly Union,” which first appeared in the Liberator before being appended by Douglass to the final pages of his narrative: “They’ll loudly talk of Christ’s reward,

Epilogue   285 / And bind his image with a cord, / And scold, and swing the lash abhorred, / And sell their brother in the Lord / To handcuffed heavenly union.”7 To honor the kinship between nineteenth-​­century protest poetry and the political verse of the early republican period is to recognize that, in a crucial sense, the political verse tradition never wholly died out after 1815 but rather continued in a different form. It is also to see that the Federalist wits who represented the losing side in the poetry wars led the way in the development of this new poetry. Having made their peace with the triumph of Democracy after 1815, many poets who had earlier waged war against Jefferson and Madison turned to speaking on behalf of enslaved African Americans and Native Americans whose culture was being threatened by an ideology of imperial expansion. In doing so, they opened the way for the emergence of poems and songs that helped fuel the growing sectional conflict that would lead to the Civil War. A detailed study of the relationship between this later poetry and the earlier verse of the Federalist era, calling for an end to slavery or the defense of Native American rights, remains to be written. Yet such a story would undoubtedly reveal that, regardless of the twists and turns of political history, American poets would never give up on the faith that had inspired their Revolutionary-​­era precursors: that poetry could indeed be a powerful weapon for resisting the myriad ways in which human beings have sought to oppress each other under the pretense of asserting legitimate authority.

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Notes

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Introduction 1. The most recent attempt to make collective sense of the literature of the American Revolution was Kenneth Silverman’s Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York, 1976). David S. Shields’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, 1997) traces the history of belles lettres during the first half of the century; Shields’s earlier work, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics and Commerce in British America (Chicago, 1990), examines public and political poetry from the same period. Recent studies of individual authors or literary coteries in the early republic include William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens, Ga., 1990) and Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (Columbia, S.C., 1999); Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002); Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore, 2007); Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, 2008). 2. For analyses of specific cultural practices in the early republican period, see Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Jeffrey Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge, 2005). The argument that Revolutionary and early republican poetry is largely uninspired is as old as the literary history of the period. Moses Coit Tyler’s groundbreaking study of Revolutionary War literature warns against looking too hard for signs of literary artistry (The Literary History of American Revolution, 1763–1783, vol. 1 (New York, 1897), 6. William Bradley concludes his study with the recommendation that this generation of poets be judged for their love of country rather than the quality of their work (American Verse, 1625–1807: A History [New York, 1909], 170–171). Vernon Parrington adds a corresponding moral criticism, treating the larger atmosphere of satiric exchange in the 1780s and 1790s as an episode dominated by mean-​­spirited invective: “Attack and counter-​­attack were slashing and acrimonious. Gentlemen forgot their manners. . . . ​Satire ran about the streets seeking new victims to impale; slander lay in wait for every passer-​­by” (Main Currents of American Thought, vol. 1: The Colonial Mind [New York, 1927], 363). Louis

288   Notes to Pages 4–8 Untermeyer interprets the putative derivative quality of American verse in nationalist terms: “America did not declare independence in poetry as quickly or as dramatically as in politics” (“Introduction,” Early American Poets [New York, 1952], v). Among the exceptions to this verdict is Samuel Marion Tucker’s contention that American poets were “equal to all but the very best” of their British contemporaries, though Tucker concedes that their poetry was “imitative of English models” (Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren, vol. 1 [New York, 1954], 184). The distinction between “poetry” and “verse” is an old one, with examples going back to Sir Philip Sydney (“Verse being but ornament and no cause to Poetry” [O.E.D., “versifier” 2). At the same time, the O.E.D. also includes examples of the two terms being treated more or less synonymously, or defining “verse” as the crucial quality that distinguishes poetry from prose (“verse” 7a). One author cited in this book describes himself as a mere “versifier” according to prevailing standards of taste (“The Versifier,” Connecticut Courant, Feb. 4, Apr. 1, Jul. 23, Aug. 19, 1793), and this usage lives on in the headings from The Cambridge History of American Literature, which tend to refer to minor or occasional poetic works as verse. Though I specify “versification” as a form of parody in which prose is transformed into verse, more generally I use the terms interchangeably. 3. The phrase “lyricization of poetry” is taken from Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, 2005), 6–10, 92–100. John McWilliams responds to the critique of the imitative aspect of eighteenth-​­century poetry by noting that imitation was an accepted practice and was in fact considered sophisticated (“Poetry in the Early Republic,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot [New York, 1988], 156–157); Michael T. Gilmore adds that such poetry functioned more as a “public” and “social” than a private or individual form, often composed for ceremonial occasions designed to foster unity among partisans (Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 1 [Cambridge, 1994], 591–594). For the argument that literary allusion in eighteenth-​­century verse contained ideological significance, see Dowling, ix–xv; Wells, 37–59. 4. [Lemuel Hopkins,] The Democratiad, A Poem, in Retaliation, for the “Philadelphia Jockey Club”. . . By a Gentleman of Connecticut (Philadelphia, 1795); The Philadelphia Jockey Club; Or, Mercantile Influence Weighed. Consisting of Select Characters Taken from the Club of Addressers. By Timothy Tickler (Philadelphia, 1795). 5. As the example of the “Echo” series indicates, the referential quality of Revolutionary and early republican political verse is especially evident in the recurring popularity of parody. The era was marked both by countless formal parodies, composed in response to official proclamations, speeches, and newspaper articles and by more informal acts of borrowing language from other sources or using fictional characters to “ventriloquize” public figures so as to critique or unmask the speaker or his discourse. 6. Such referentialism may be said to anticipate the broad acceptance of various forms of artistic referentialism in our own time, as in digital sampling in popular music; indeed, when a musician “quotes” or imitates an existing work for the purpose of creating something new out of it, it is considered beside the point to criticize that artist for being insufficiently original. 7. The term “distant reading” is taken from the title of Franco Moretti’s recent work that outlines a radically new approach to literary history characterized by analyzing large amounts of data (such as the titles of English novels) to identify meaningful trends or

Notes to Pages 8–10   289 patterns (Distant Reading [London, 2013], passim, see esp. 1–43, 179–210). My use of such techniques involves analyzing publication information on American poetry from two indispensable databases available from Readex: America’s Historical Imprints and America’s Historical Newspapers. 8. Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge, 2009), 11; E. Warwick Slinn, “Poetry and Culture: Performativity and Critique,” New Literary History 30 (1999), 66. In treating political poetry as a mode of discourse, I draw on V. N. Volosinov’s description of discourse as a “chain of utterances” in which “Any utterance . . . ​ is only a single moment in the continuous process of verbal communication.” Contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin’s pronouncement that poetry is a monological form, Volosinov maintains that certain types of poetry, such as parody and other forms of response poetry, should be read as dialogical in the context of the chains of utterance to which they belong (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunuk [Cambridge, Mass., 1986], 94–98). 9. Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123 (2008), 205. Slinn, 64. Antony Easthope argues that what makes poetry unique as a discursive form is that unlike primarily “communicative” forms of language, poetry foregrounds the signifier (the element of language characterized, for instance, by sound) as much as the signified (the abstract meaning of a word), as in the difference between saying “I like Ike” and “I support Ike”; the former participates in political discourse in a way that is both performative and self-​­conscious of its linguistic status (Poetry as Discourse [London, 1983], 3–18). Dowling makes a similar argument in reference to eighteenth-​­century British poetry (The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-​­Century Verse Epistle [Princeton, 1991], 32–33). 10. Christopher Looby argues that the persistent cultural significance of voiced forms such as poetry, songs, and sermons in the early republican period suggests a broader anxiety among Americans over “the sufficiency of textuality as a ground for authority” (Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States [Chicago, 1996], 44). Jay Fliegelman argues that the American Revolution was accompanied by a “revolution in the conceptualization of language” in which rhetoricians sought to “make writing over in the image of speaking” (Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance [Stanford, Calif., 1993], 24). 11. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 106; Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-​­Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), ix– xv, 1–33. Warner’s application of Habermas focuses less on the public sphere as a political reality than as an ideology that insisted on the idealized public sphere as described by Habermas; thus, even those who criticize Habermas’s argument (see below) credit Warner for accurately describing the ideology of print culture in eighteenth-​­century America. 12. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 109–142, qt. 113. Critiques and revisions to Habermas’s theory have come in several forms: following Fraser in problematizing the ideal of accessibility, Carroll Smith-​­Rosenberg focuses on the discursive world projected by early American magazines as a “creation of an emergent bourgeoisie and its middling social and political allies” (This Violent Empire: The Birth of American National Identity [Chapel Hill, 2010], 27). Other critiques focus on the idea that the public sphere was characterized by rational and deliberate exchanges of ideas (see, e.g., Michael Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public

290   Notes to Pages 10–14 Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 99–108; John L. Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher [Chapel Hill, 2004], 207–250). Still others complicate the conceptualization of a unified “public” (Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72.1 (2000), 153–182) or the view that print culture in eighteenth-​­century America was unified enough to constitute an “imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson describes it in Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); see, e.g., Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York, 2007). 13. See Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters, for a discussion of the role of poetry in the social life of colonial colleges (165–174). Among the writers I describe who composed their earliest works in college are John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau, Joseph Dennie, and Robert Treat Paine. Among the list of political poets who made their living in one of the educated professions are Trumbull, St. George Tucker (law), Timothy Dwight (divinity), and Lemuel Hopkins (medicine). Freneau, Barlow, and Theodore Dwight are remembered as political poets who also edited newspapers. The first newspaper to include regular literary submissions was James Franklin’s New England Courant, beginning in 1735; his brother Benjamin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was one of the first to include an annual address in verse of the “printer’s lad,” beginning the trend of New Year’s carrier’s addresses. Both Franklins’ editorial careers affirm Jeffrey Pasley’s characterization of colonial printers as “the intellectual elite of the American working class” (The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic [Charlottesville, Va., 2002], 24). 14. The identification of the newsboy with the people is perhaps seen most explicitly in the title of the following broadside from 1766: Vox populi. Liberty, Property, and No Stamps. The News-​­Boy who carries the Boston Evening-​­Post, with the greatest Submission begs Leave to present the following Lines to the Gentlemen and Ladies to whom he carries the News (Boston, 1766). 15. This is the print public sphere as described by John L. Brooke as a “complex field” of discursive struggle in which authors and texts engaged with one another to “shape and limit the outlines of the possible” (211); I follow Brooke’s assertion that though the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts crises produced “an explosion of deliberative print . . . ​as deliberation failed and the legitimacy of the imperial polity fell into question,” there emerged in its place “a secular politics of persuasion” characterized by passion as opposed to rational deliberation (231). 16. I follow William B. Warner’s analysis of what he calls the “multimedia buzz of communication” during the Revolutionary era (Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution [Chicago, 2013], 20–27, qt. 26). 17. To cite, by way of introduction, a typical example of such strings of literary exchange, a poem that celebrated the creation of the first National Bank in 1791 (“Bank of the United States,” Gazette of the United States, Apr. 6, 1791) was answered by another poem that characterized precisely this sanguine view of Hamilton’s financial scheme as a symptom of the “speculation fever” said to be spreading to all levels of the administration (The Glass; or, Speculation; a Poem. Containing an Account of the Ancient, and Genius of the Modern, Speculators [New York, 1791]; this poem was, in turn, countered by a third poem

Notes to Pages 14–17   291 reinterpreting such suspicion of the administration as a sign of ideological delusion or paranoia (“The Echo, No. XI,” American Mercury, Feb. 23, 1793). 18. James Roger Sharp describes the federal government as emerging institutionally amid “a hothouse atmosphere of passion, suspicion, and fear” (American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis [New Haven, 1993], 1–17, qt. 1). This emphasis on a mutually conspiratorial perspective on political conflict in the 1790s has since been developed by numerous historians. Elizabeth R. Varon argues that such early partisan disputes (and more particularly, the mutual claims that the opposition posed a threat to the republic) constitute the first phase of the process of disunion that would culminate in Southern secession (Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 [Chapel Hill, 2008]. Though Sharp emphasizes a breakdown of “elite consensus,” cultural historians such as Jeffrey Pasley describe the proto-​­parties as emerging in a more decentralized atmosphere in which newspapers and political associations play a larger role in defining the terms of political conflict (The Tyranny of Printers, passim; The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy (Lawrence, Kans., 2013), passim. For a synthesis that considers the extreme rhetoric of political elites, newspaper editors, and rank-​­and-​­file citizens, see Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic (Oxford, 2009), 140–173. 19. Befitting a work that deals with the contested nature of political language, I refer to parties and movements by their preferred names (except when articulating the opposing side’s characterization): I refer to the opposing sides in the Revolutionary War as Patriots (as opposed to Whigs) and Loyalists (as opposed to Tories), the opposing sides of the constitutional debate as Federalists and Anti-​­Federalists, and the parties forming in the 1790s as Federalists and Republicans (as opposed to Democratic-​­Republicans). 20. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York, 1993), 513–518; Sharp, 138–163. 21. Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton, 2007), 12. Philip Gould focuses on the anxieties of identity faced by American Loyalists in the transatlantic imperial context of the Revolutionary War (Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America [Oxford, 2013]. I use the term “transatlantic” in describing British-​­American relations and tensions before and during the Revolution and “transnational” to describe such complications after the creation of the United States. 22. The idea that literary form was itself capable of communicating ideological content is taken from Frederic Jameson’s term “ideology of form,” which is in turn derived from Louis Hjelmslev’s notion of the “content of form” (Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y., 1981; Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield, rev. ed. [Madison, Wis., 1961], chap. 13). Edward Cahill argues for a homologous relationship between the discourses of aesthetics and politics in the early republican period (Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States [Philadelphia, 2012]); Eric Slauter focuses on the way in which aesthetic and cultural categories served as metaphors for the theories underlying the constitutional debates (The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution [Chicago, 2009).

292   Notes to Pages 19–27 Chapter 1 1. The Association, &c. of the Delegates of the Colonies, at the Grand Congress, Held at Philadelphia, Sept 1., 1774, Versified, and adapted to Music, Calculated for Grave and Gay Dispositions; with a Short Introduction. By Bob Jingle, Esq., Poet Laureate to the Congress (Philadelphia, 1774), 4. 2. The term “interpellation,” referring to the function of an ideological state apparatus to “hail” a subject implicitly as subject of the state, comes from Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971), 153–154. I use the term to describe a proclamation’s intention rather than the fulfillment of that intention, as the versification vogue itself attests to the limited power of the interpellating function of Gage’s proclamations. 3. Thomas Gage, By His Excellency The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq; Governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same. A Proclamation (Boston, 1775). 4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 7–8, 25–26. In his study of proclamations in colonial America, Larry Skillin argues that after 1700, print culture underwent a change from being dominated by the unidirectional communication of official proclamations to being defined by an open, dialogic public sphere as described Habermas. My addendum to Skillin’s argument is that the versification vogue appeared as a popular literary response to Gage’s attempt to reclaim an authority that had been rendered anachronistic by the development of the public discourse Skillin describes (“From Proclamation to Dialogue: The Colonial Press and the Emergence of an American Public Sphere” [Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2009], passim). 5. William B. Warner, Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovations and the American Revolution (Chicago, 2013), 1; [Boston Committee of Correspondence,] Gentlemen, The evils which we have long foreseen are now come upon this town and province, the long meditated stroke is now given to the civil liberty of this country? . . . ​(Boston, 1774). “By the Governor. A Proclamation For discouraging certain illegal Combinations,” Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-​­Boy, June 27, 1774. This was Gage’s second proclamation as governor, following one in which he announces his appointment as “Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay” and orders all officers to “continue in the Exercise of the Trusts reposed to them” (“By His Excellency Thomas Gage Esq. . . . ​A Proclamation,” Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Post-​­Boy, May 16, 1774). 6. [Thomas Gage,] “By the Governor. A Proclamation For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for preventing and punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality,” Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Weekly, July 28, 1774. 7. “A Proclamation,” in A Mirror for a Printer (n.p. [Boston?], 1774). 8. “From the Virginia Gazette, August 25. A Parody on a Late Proclamation” (n.p. [Boston?], 1774). 9. Ibid. 10. Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, second series (1823), vol. 2 (London, 1849), 505. For the idea that eighteenth-​­century poets recognized the capacity of verse to call to mind linguistic self-​­consciousness, see William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-​­Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, 1991), 32–33.

Notes to Pages 27–34   293 11. David Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago, 1990), 128–136. 12. The argument that print culture was an agent in the development of nationalism goes back to Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London, 1983]), whose argument has undergone revision by scholars contending that the print public sphere in eighteenth-​­century America was not national but made up of separate, local public spheres. See, e.g., Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building (New York, 2007), 5–15, passim. In Protocols of Liberty, Warner painstakingly reveals the step-​­by-​­step process by which printed documents and letters disseminated via the postal system created conditions for specific political action on the part of American Whigs (passim). My addendum to this argument is that this atmosphere of intercolonial cooperation is also evident in the proliferation of versifications, such as those against Gage, that appeared in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. 13. [Thomas Gage,] By the governor. A proclamation. Whereas a number of persons unlawfully assembled at Cambridge, in the month of October last, calling themselves a Provincial Congress. . . . ​Given at Boston, this tenth day of November. . . . ​1774 (n.p., [1774]). “A Proclamation,” Newport Mercury, Nov. 21, 1774. [Gage, Thomas,] By his Excellency The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq; governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts-​­Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same. A Proclamation (Boston, 1775). 14. [John Trumbull,] A New Proclamation! (Hartford, 1775), 1, 7. (Quotations are taken from the pamphlet publication that appeared soon after its appearance in the Connecticut Courant on Aug. 7 and 14, 1775. Some confusion exists as to the authorship of Freneau’s Thomas Gage’s Proclamation Versified (New York, 1775). It was tentatively ascribed to Trumbull by James Hammond Trumbull, and that attribution remains in Evans; however, Victor H. Paltsits attributed it to Freneau in A Bibliography of the Separate and Collected Works of Philip Freneau (New York, 1903), 27. Paltsits’s attribution is supported by its place of publication in New York, where Freneau was residing in 1775 . 15. [Trumbull,] A New Proclamation! 2–3; Trumbull would revise the latter passage and include it in M’Fingal. 16. [Freneau,] Thomas Gage’s Proclamation Versified. 17. [Thomas Gage,] By the Governor. A proclamation. Whereas, notwithstanding the repeated assurances of the selectmen and others, that all the inhabitants of the town of Boston had bona fide, delivered their fire-​­arms unto the persons appointed to receive them. . . . ​Given at Boston, the nineteenth day of June, 1775 (Boston, 1775). [Thomas Gage,] By the governor. A proclamation. Whereas the public seal of the province of the Massachusetts-​­Bay, abovesaid, was . . . ​stolen from the Council-​­chamber in Boston . . . ​I do hereby offer a reward of ten guineas. . . . ​Given at Boston, the third day of October, 1775 . . . ​(Boston, 1775). William Howe, A Proclamation. By His Excellency. The Honorable William Howe (Boston, 1775); Howe’s proclamation, versified (n.p. [Boston?], 1775). For other anti-​­Howe poems, see, e.g., “A NEW SONG. Composed by a Soldier in the Continental Army,” Essex Journal and New-​ ­Hampshire Packet (Newburyport, Mass.), Dec. 22, 1775. 18. For a discussion of pump verses as weapons against claims to prerogative by colonial governors in the period prior to the Stamp Act, see Shields, Oracles of Empire, 99–108. 19. An example of a New Year’s verse that promotes the value of the press generally is the untitled 1735 broadside address of the carrier of the American Weekly Mercury

294   Notes to Pages 34–37 (Philadelphia, 1735), which proclaims, “There’s not an Ear that is not deaf / But listens to the News,” before proudly listing the remote sources of news from that year: “Th’Italians, Persians, Moors and Turks, / Tho’ distant far, we bring / The News of all their Wars and Works, / And which affect our King” (qt. in A Checklist of American Newspaper Carriers’ Addresses, 1720–1820, ed. Gerald D. McDonald, Stuart C. Sherman, and Mary Russo [Worcester, Mass., 2000], iv–xii). 20. The News-​­Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s VERSES. Humbly Address’d to the Gentleman and Ladies to whom he carries the Boston Evening-​­Post, published by T. and J. Fleet. . . . ​ December 31, 1764 (Boston, 1764); Vox populi, Liberty, property and no stamps. The newsboy who carries the Boston Evening-​­Post, with the greatest submission begs leave to present the following lines to the gentlemen and ladies to whom he carries the news (Boston, 1766). 21. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-​­Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 69; for his account of the ideological importance of print, see also ix–xv, 39–43. Examples of New Year’s poems either lamenting the passage of the Stamp Act or celebrating its repeal include: To the customers of the Newport Mercury. Gentlemen and ladies, I once more assume the honour of presenting you with a poetical address, (if it can be so called) on the anniversary of a New-​­Year. If it is agreeable, I doubt not but you will confer a very generous token of approbation on, gentlemen and ladies, your very obsequious, much obliged, truly humble, and most devoted servant, Eben. Hall, n.c. (Newport, 1766); New-​­Year’s verses for the lad who carries the Connecticut gazette to its encouragers in New-​­Haven. A.D. 1767 (New Haven, 1766); New-​­Year’s verses, of the printer’s boys, who carry about the South-​­Carolina gazette, and country journal; addressed to the customers thereof. Thursday, January 1, 1767 (Charleston, S.C., 1766); The News-​­boy, who now carries the New-​­Hampshire gazette, presents his compliments of joy to the customers on the commencement of the year 1767 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1766). 22. New Year’s Ode, for the Year 1766, Being actually dictated, by Lawrence Swinney Carrier of News, Enemy of Stamps, a Friend to the Constitution, and an Englishman every Inch (New York, 1765). For examples of New Year’s verses by prominent political poets, see [Philip Freneau,] New Year’s verses addressed to the customers of the Freeman’s Journal, by the lad who carrier it. January 8th, 1783 (Philadelphia, 1783); [Joel Barlow,] The carrier of the American Mercury wishes his customers a happy New-​­Year, and presents the following (Hartford, 1785); [Lemuel Hopkins,] Guillotina; or the annual song of the tenth muse. Addressed to the readers of the Connecticut Courant. . . . ​(Hartford, 1796); [Richard Alsop, Lemuel Hopkins, and Theodore Dwight,] The Political Greenhouse, for the Year 1798. Addressed to the Readers of the Hartford Courant (Hartford, 1799); [Theodore Dwight,] “The Triumph of Democracy,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 5, 1801; [Timothy Dwight,] “An Extract from ‘The Retrospect,’ ” Mercury and the New-​­England Palladium, Jan. 2, 1801. 23. For a study of the aesthetics of ritual in pre-​­Revolutionary America, see Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 5–25; for more on funerals to Liberty and their capacity to invoke a sense of intercolonial connectivity, see Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia, 2007), 50. 24. January 1766. The carrier of the Boston-​­Gazette, to his Customers (Boston, 1766). Robert Middlekauff notes the correspondence between Stamp Act protest symbolism and that of English Augustan poetry in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763– 1789 (Oxford, 2005), describing how protesters in Newport hanged an effigy of a stamp-

Notes to Pages 37–43   295 man named Martin Howard, on which they added an inscription renaming him “Martinus Scriblerus,” after the ridiculous character created by Pope, Swift, and John Gay (105). 25. A New Collection of Verses. Applied to the First of November, A.D., etc. Including a Prediction that the S‑‑‑p A‑t shall not take Place in North America. Together with a poetical Dream, Concerning Stamped Papers (New Haven, 1765), 3, 11, 14, 16. The emphasis on the Stamp Act as a symbolic rape against American liberty places this poem into the literary category first described by Kenneth Silverman as “Whig Sentimentalism,” an Anglo-​ ­American mode of writing that represents political conflict through the lenses of Christian morality and intense emotion. One common trope of such literature, as Silverman and Shields illustrate, is a tendency to present political injustice as an abuse of the vulnerable—​ ­ omen, children, the poor (Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revoluw tion [New York, 1975], 82–87; Shields, Oracles of Empire, 166–169). 26. New-​­Year’s Verses, Of the Printer’s Boys, who carry about the SOUTH-​­CAROLINA GAZETTE, and COUNTRY JOURNAL; addressed to the Customers thereof, Thursday, January 1, 1767 (Charleston, 1767). For other poetic celebrations of the repeal of the Act, see, e.g., Good news for America: To the Sons of Liberty ([Philadelphia, 1766]); Joyful News to America, A Poem. Expressive of Our more than ordinary Joy, on the Repeal of the Stamp-​­Act. Together with the Praise of Liberty, and Two Acrosticks ([Philadelphia,] 1766); A New Year’s Wish from the Carrier of the Post-​­Boy & Advertiser ([Boston, 1766]). 27. The North Briton was begun in 1762 in response to the formation of a pro-​­Bute paper, the Briton, edited by Tobias Smollet. Taking aim at Bute’s nationality, the North Briton was largely parodic, written in the comic voice of a Scotsman or “north Briton” who ironically celebrates Bute’s ascension as a bloodless culmination of the rebellion of 1745. This same parodic voice appears in Oppression: A Poem in the figure of the annotator, who writes from the perspective of a proud, patriotic Scotsman. In April 1763, the North Briton, No. 45, published an attack against the king that was taken by many as seditious libel, and Wilkes was arrested and temporarily stripped of his position in Parliament. Wilkes then fled to Paris, where he remained until 1768, and during this period he was found guilty in absentia. Nevertheless, his case spawned popular defenses of him on grounds of freedom of the press, such that the phrase “Wilkes and Liberty” was frequently invoked on both sides of the Atlantic; see Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, 2006), 65–120. For Wilkes’s importance as a symbol of liberty in colonial America, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 110–112; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 161–169. 28. Oppression. A Poem. By an American. With Notes, by a North Briton (Boston, 1765), 1–2. For more on the tendency of Augustan satirists to view their writings as a mode of intervening in a narrative of imperial corruption and decline, see William Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens, Ga., 1990), 10–14, 43–47. 29. [Benjamin Church,] The Times. A Poem (Boston, 1765), 3. 30. [Church,] 10, 11; Oppression, 9, 11; Charles Churchill, The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (Oxford, 1956), 385. Both poems draw directly on Churchill’s broader verdict against defenses of parliamentary policy on the grounds of sound “oeconomy.” “Time was,” Churchill wrote in a passage in his own poem, The Times, contrasting the virtuous past with the corrupt present, “E’re a great Nation, no less just than free, / Was made a beggar by Oeconomy” (391). Similarly, Oppression refers to the policy as “stale

296   Notes to Pages 43–50 OECONOMY” (6) and Church presents it as a form of ideological manipulation: “ ’Tis vile

profusion’s ministerial name, / To pinch the farmer groaning at the press” (8). For more on the career and reputation of Huske, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Liberty Tree, a Genealogy,” New England Quarterly 25.4 (1952), 439. 31. Edward Young, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (1728) in The Complete Works, Poetry and Prose, of the Rev. Edward Young, rev. ed., ed. John Doran, 2 vols. (London, 1854), vol. 1, 347; [Church,] 5, 10. 32. Oppression, 12. 33. This is the logic of corruption famously described by Bailyn in Ideological Origins (94–143). 34. “Triumphant; or Old England’s Downfall,” London Chronicle, Feb. 20, 1766, rpt. in James C. Gaston, The London Poets of the American Revolution (Troy, N.Y., 1979), 42. For other British poetic responses to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, see Gaston, 29–72. 35. Oppression, 3. On the moderate tone of Dickinson’s Letters, see Maier, 114–115; Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: the American Revolution, 1763–1789 (Oxford, 2005), 160–161. 36. “Copy of a Letter written by the Hon. the House of Representatives, in the last Session of the General Assembly, and sent to the representative Assemblies on the Continent,” Boston Weekly News-​­Letter, June 23, 1768, rpt. in Silverman, 112–113. 37. Silverman, 113; [John Dickinson,] “A Song. To the Tune of Heart of Oak, &c.,” Pennsylvania Journal, July 7, 1768, rpt. in Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, July 11, 1768; Boston Evening-​­Post, Aug. 22, 1768; Boston Chronicle, Aug. 29–Sept. 5, 1768; New-​­Hampshire Gazette, and Historical Chronicle (Portsmouth, N.H.), Sept. 2, 1768. The song also appeared as a broadside, A New Song. To the tune of Hearts of Oak, &c. (Philadelphia, 1768). Accounts of public performances of the song include a gathering of gentlemen in Boston that included “45 loyal toasts” in commemoration of John Wilkes’s North Briton, No. 45 (Boston Gazette, Aug. 8, 1768) and a meeting of the “principal Mechanicks” of Charleston, S.C., around a Liberty Tree decorated with “45 lights” (Boston Evening-​­Post, Nov. 8, 1768). For songs inspired by Dickinson’s, see, e.g., “A Liberty Song,” New-​­York Gazette; or the Weekly Post-​­Boy, Feb. 26, 1770; “Liberty Song, Tune, Smile Britannia,” Essex Gazette (Salem, Mass.), Oct. 18–25, 1774. 38. [Dickinson,] “A Song.” 39. Ibid. For Townshend Acts poems emphasizing legal or political, rather than economic, grievances, see Liberty. A Poem (Philadelphia, 1768); Alexander Martin, America. A Poem (Philadelphia, [1769]); While gasping Freedom wails her future Fate, And Commerce sickens with the sick’ning State . . . ​(Boston, 1768). 40. “Last Tuesday the following Song made its Appearance from a Garret at C-​­st-​­e W‑‑‑‑‑m,” SUPPLEMENT (Extraordinary) to the Boston-​­Gazette, &c., Sept. 26, 1768, rpt. as “A Parody Upon the well known Liberty Song. (Said to be in great Vogue at a certain Fortress, where it was compos’d),” SUPPLEMENT to the Boston Evening-​­Post, Sept. 26, 1768. 41. SUPPLEMENT . . . ​to the Boston Gazette, Sept. 26, 1768. 42. “The Parody parodized, Or the Massachusetts Song of Liberty,” Boston-​­Gazette, and Country Journal, Oct. 3, 1768. The song was reprinted in America (see Boston Evening-​ ­Post, Oct. 3, 1768; Essex Gazette [Salem, Mass.], Sept. 27–Oct. 4, 1768; Newport Mercury, Oct. 3–10, 1768); and in England (see St. James Chronicle, Nov. 11, 1768).

Notes to Pages 51–60   297 43. “The Female Patriots. Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty in America, 1768,” Pennsylvania Chronicle, and Universal Advertiser, Dec. 18–25, 1769. 44. Ibid. For a discussion of the gendered conception of virtue and its opposition to “luxury” and “effeminacy” in pro-​­Revolutionary ideology, see Bailyn, 135–143. 45. The Female Patriot, No. 1. Addressed to the Tea-​­Drinking Ladies of New-​­York ([New York], 1770. 46. Hannah Griffits’s companion poems, “Wrote on the Last Day of Feby. 1775. Beware the Ides of March” and “The Ladies Lamentation over an Empty Cannister. By the Same,” are collected in Milcah Martha Moore’s commonplace book, which circulated among the members of Moore’s literary circle in Philadelphia and New Jersey (Catherine La Courreye Bleck and Karin A. Wulf, eds., Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (University Park, Pa., 1997), 246–250. [Mercy Otis Warren,] “To the Hon. J. Winthrop, Esq.,” Royal American Magazine, 1.6 (June 1774), 233–234.

Chapter 2 1. William B. Warner describes the “complex ecology of communication” through which political action and print mediation of such action came together to create a communications network that ultimately made possible the movement for independence (Protocols of Liberty: Communication and the American Revolution [Chicago, 2013], 21). Carroll Smith-​­Rosenberg analyzes the “cacophony of warring discourses” through which American identity was mediated in magazines during the period of Shays’ rebellion (This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity [Chapel Hill, 2010], 134). 2. “By the Great and General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts-​­Bay. A Proclamation [Jan. 19, 1776],” Essex Journal (Newburyport, Mass.), Feb. 16, 1776; “By His Excellency William Franklin, Esq. . . . ​A Proclamation,” New York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury, June 3, 1776; “In Provincial Congress, New-​­Jersey, Burlington, June 14, 1776,” Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet or, the General Advertiser, June 17, 1776. William Howe’s proclamations include A Proclamation. By His Excellency, the Honorable William Howe [Oct. 28, 1775] (Boston, 1775) and A Proclamation. by His Excellency, the Honorable William Howe [Nov. 6, 1775] (Boston, 1775). For a verse parody of the latter proclamation, see Howe’s proclamation, versified (Boston, 1775). 3. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (Oxford, 2005), 373–391. 4. John Burgoyne, By His Excellency John Burgoyne, Esquire, Lieutenant-​­General of his Majesty’s Forces in America, colonel of the Queen’s Regiment of Light Dragoons, Governor of Fort-​­William, in North Britain, one of the Representatives of the Commons of Great-​­Britain in Parliament, and Commanding an Army and Fleet in an Expedition from Canada, &c., &c., &c. ([Newport?] 1777). 5. Independent Chronicle, and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), Aug. 14, 1777; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Aug. 28, 1777; ibid., Aug. 21, 1777. For the charge that Burgoyne encouraged his Native American forces to scalp civilians, and even paid them per scalp, see Horatio Gates’s letter to John Hancock in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, Sept. 2, 1777; for Gates’s accusation against Burgoyne and Burgoyne’s denial, see ibid., Sept. 16, 1777. 6. [William Livingston,] “Proclamation,” Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 26, 1777.

298   Notes to Pages 60–69 Frank Moore’s 1856 anthology Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution (Port Washington, N.Y., 1964) attributes the poem to Francis Hopkinson, but Livingston’s authorship is confirmed in Theodore Sedgwick Jr., A Memoir of the Life of William Livingston: Member of Congress in 1774, 1775, and 1776; and Governor of the State of New Jersey from 1776 to 1790 (New York, 1833), 241–242. For other poems on Burgoyne’s surrender, see “The Fate of John Burgoyne,” in Moore, ed., 142; Case Wheeler, “The Lamentations of General Burgoyne,” in Poems, Occasioned by Several Circumstances and Occurrencies, in the Present grand Contest of America for Liberty (New Haven, 1778). For a broad study of anti-​ ­Burgoyne poetry, see William L. Stone, ed., Ballads and Poems Relating to the Burgoyne Campaign (Albany, N.Y., 1893), 1–110. 7. Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 26, 1777. Middlekauff, 379. 8. “By his Excellency WILLIAM LIVINGSTON, Esquire, Governor, Captain General and Commander in Chief in and over the State of New-​­Jersey and territories thereunto belonging, Chancellor and Ordinary in the same. A Proclamation,” Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 26, 1777. 9. Victor Hugo Paltsis, John Holt, Printer and Postmaster: Some Facts and Documents Related to His Career (New York, 1920), 6–7. In the Oct. 6 issue of the Journal, while reporting on Burgoyne’s campaign, Holt informs his readers that the paper’s financial losses necessitate an increase in price, “without which he cannot carry on his business”; the following issue (Oct. 13) was Holt’s last in Kingston, though in 1778 he reestablished the Journal in Poughkeepsie. 10. New-​­York Journal, and the General Advertiser, Sept. 1, Sept. 8, Oct. 6, Oct. 13, 1777. 11. William Wolcott, Grateful Reflections On the Divine Goodness vouchsaf ’d to the American Arms in their remarkable successes in the Northern Department, after the giving up of our Fortresses at Ticonderoga, on the 6th of July, A.D. 1777 (Hartford, 1779); “Cornwallis Burgoyned,” in Moore, ed., 269. 12. Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford, 2013), 89–96. The Association, &c. of the Delegates of the Colonies, at the Grand Congress, Held at Philadelphia, Sept. 1, 1774, Versified, and adapted to Music, Calculated for Grave and Gay Dispositions; with a Short Introduction. By Bob Jingle, Esq; Poet Laureat to the Congress ([New York,] 1774), iii. 13. Proceedings of the grand American Continental Congress a Philadelphia, September 5, 1774. Association, &c. (Portsmouth, N.H., 1774), 1. [“Bob Jingle,”] The Association, 14. Gould argues that Bob Jingle attempts to debase the cultural position of the leaders of Congress in part out of a sense of anxiety over Loyalists’ own cultural distance from the metropolitan center of the British Empire (113). This was also a popular theme in nonparodic loyalist songs and poems, such as “A Song, Wrote in the Spring of the Year 1776,” which later came to be known simply as “The Congress”: “These hardy knaves and stupid fools; / Some apish and pragmatic mules, / Some servile acquiescing tools; / These, these, compose the Congress (Pennsylvania Evening Post, Dec. 20, 1777). 14. “The following Abstract of the Resolves of the General Congress, assembled at Philadelphia in 1775, is put into Metre, for the help of weak Memories,” Public Advertiser (London), Dec. 13, 1775, rpt. in Gaston, ed., 111–112. 15. [Jonathan Odell,] “The Word of Congress. A Poem,” Royal Gazette, Sept. 18, 1779. Cynthia Dubin Edelberg, Jonathan Odell: Loyalist Poet of the American Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1987), 53–62.

Notes to Pages 70–81   299 16. Ibid. For a discussion of high Augustan satire as invoking the collective, anonymous voice of the community asserting an unchanging moral order in a seemingly “inverted” world, see Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), 31–32, 46–47. 17. [Odell,] “Word of Congress.” 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. “The Massachusetts Congress’s Address to General Washington versified by An Independent Whig,” Public Advertiser (London), Sept. 6, 1775, rpt. in Gaston, ed., 95–96. 22. Americans to Arms. Sung to the tune of, Britons to Arms ([Salem, Mass.?,] [1775?]). [Jonathan Mitchell Sewell,] A New Song. To the Tune of the British Grenadier (n.p., [1776?]). For a description of the symbolic role of British regimental ballads, C. Lewis Winstock, Songs & Music of the Redcoats: A History of the War Music of the British Army, 1642–1902 (London, 1970). 23. “The King’s Own Regulars, and the Triumph over the Irregulars. A new Song,” Pennsylvania Evening Post, Mar. 30, 1776. 24. See, e.g., Elisha Rich, A Poem upon the Bloody Engagement that was fought on ­Bunker’s-​­Hill  .  .  . ​(Chelmsford, Mass., 1775); Rich, Poetical Remarks on the Fight at the Boston Light-​­House (Chelmsford, 1775); An Elegy, Occasion’d by the Death of Major-​­General Joseph Warren (Watertown, Mass., 1775); “Battle of Trenton” (1776), in Moore, ed., 150; “Saratoga Song” (1777), in Moore, ed., 176; An Elegy on the death of the Honourable Col. Alexander Scammel, Who was killed at the taking of Lord Corn Wallis at Little York in Virginia. . . . ​A poem (n.p., [1781?]); [Annis Boudinot Stockton,] “On hearing the news of the capture of Lord Cornwallis and the British army, by. Gen. Washington. By a Lady of New-​ J­ ersey,” New-​­Jersey Gazette (Trenton), Nov. 28, 1781. 25. George Everett Hastings, The Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson (New York, 1955), 290–295. 26. [Francis Hopkinson,] “British Valour Displayed: or, the Battle of the Kegs,” Pennsylvania Packet, Mar. 4, 1778. I refer to the song according to the simpler and more common title “The Battle of the Kegs,” which is given in the later broadside version, The Battle of the Kegs. Together with the chearful Wife (Boston, n.d. [1780–1806]); quotations are taken from the latter. 27. [Hopkinson,] Battle of the Kegs. 28. Connecticut Journal (New Haven), Aug. 3, 1780; [John André,] Cow-​­Chace, in Three Cantos, Published on Occasion of the Rebel General Wayne’s Attack of the Refugees Blockhouse on Hudson’s River, On Friday the 21st of July, 1780 (New York, 1780), 3. The poem first appeared in three installments in the Royal Gazette on Aug. 16, Aug. 30, and Sept. 23, 1780. 29. [André,] 5, 13. 30. Ibid., 15–17. 31. J. A. Leo Lemay, “The American Origins of ‘Yankee Doodle,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (1976), 435–464; qt. 445. There is no extant version of “Yankee Doodle” that can be dated precisely to 1775, and most attempts to assign exact dates to the broadside editions of the song have been unsuccessful. Internal and external evidence, however, illustrates that the song predates the outbreak of the Revolution by several

300   Notes to Pages 81–86 decades (probably originating in the Battle of Cape Breton, 1745, during King George’s War). “Adam’s Fall: The Trip to Cambridge,” in Moore, ed., 99–102; “Yankee Doodle’s Expedition to Rhode Island, written at Philadelphia,” in [André,] 19. 32. Pennsylvania Journal, Mar. 22, 1775; Lemay, 464. The reference to “Yankee Doodle” from M’Fingal goes as follows: “Did not our troops show much discerning, / And skill your various arts in learning? / Outwent they not each native Noodle / By far in playing Yanky-​­doodle; / Which, as ’twas your New-​­England tune, / ’Twas marvelous they took so soon? / And ere the year was fully thro’, / Did not they learn to foot it too; / And such a dance as ne’er was known, / For twenty miles on end lead down?” (John Trumbull, M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem, in Four Cantos [Hartford, 1782], 31–32). 33. The Yankey’s return from Camp (n.p., n.d. [1775–1810]). The most common published version of the song between 1775 and 1810 contains what Lemay calls the “Visit to Camp” stanzas, which include the citation above; several distinct broadsides appeared under the title The Farmer and his Son’s Return from a Visit to the Camp; most cannot be dated more precisely than between 1775 and 1810, though one version, The Farmer and his Son’s Return from a Visit to the Camp: Together with the Rose Tree (n.p., n.d.), has been dated by S. Foster Damon as appearing in or after 1786 (Damon, Yankee Doodle [Providence, 1959,] 6); other variations on the camp theme include A Yankee Song (Salem, Mass., 1793). 34. Arguing against the tendency to interpret American literature as a form of postcolonial literature, Leonard Tennenhouse proposes that early American culture is best understood as the product of a diasporic community that sought to preserve, in literature and culture, an American “brand of Englishness” (The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 [Princeton, 2007], 1–18, passim). 35. Quotation reprinted in Victor Gimmestad, John Trumbull (New York, 1974), 87; for more on Trumbull’s being urged by friends to lend his satiric talent to the Patriot cause, see Alexander Cowie, John Trumbull, Connecticut Wit (Chapel Hill, 1936), 160; Gimmestad, 82–83. The date of publication of the single-​­canto version of M’Fingal has been a source of some confusion because although Trumbull completed the poem in late 1775 and the first edition carries that date on its title page, it was not offered to the public until January 1776; I follow Gimmestad and Leon Howard (The Connecticut Wits [Chicago, 1943]) in referring to the first edition of the poem as the 1776 edition. For a list of reprints of M’Fingal, see Cowie, 188–192, 221–222; Gimmestad, 100–101. 36. Joel Barlow, The Columbiad[:] A Poem (Philadelphia, 1807), 313. For a discussion of M’Fingal’s popularity, Trumbull’s fame as an author and the dinners held in his honor, see Cowie, 182, 213; Gimmestad, 102–103. 37. On Trumbull’s revision of the poem between 1776 and 1782, see Cowie, 192–193; Howard, 70–77; Gimmestad, 97–100; Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-​­Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, 1999), 312. Cowie and Gimmestad note Trumbull’s incorporation of lines from A New Proclamation! into M’Fingal, but they refrain from commenting on the significance (Cowie, 158–159; Gimmestad, 81–84). 38. John Trumbull, M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem. Canto First, or the Town-​­Meeting (Philadelphia, 1775 [1776]), 1; Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford, 1967), 1. Though Hudibras has traditionally been defined as differing from mock epic in its use of low, rather than ironically elevated, diction and tone, it has also been described an early and important precursor to the proliferation of mock-​­heroic poetry in eighteenth-​

Notes to Pages 86–96   301 ­century Britain and America; see, e.g., Richmond Bond, English Burlesque Poetry: 1700– 1750 (New York, 1964), 5–17; Richard Terry, Mock Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English Genre and Discourse (Aldershot, 2005), 37–55. 39. Trumbull, M’Fingal [1776], 2; Butler, 7: “For his Religion it was fit / To match his Learning and his Wit: / ’Twas Presbyterian true blew, / For he was of that stubborn Crew / Of Errant Saints, whom all men grant / To be the true Church Militant.” 40. Cataloguing the revisions made to the M’Fingal between 1776 and 1782, Howard writes that the poem became “a mock epic in structure as well as in title” (75). 41. Trumbull, M’Fingal [1776], 6, 7–8, 15–16. 42. Ibid., 37, 12–13. The opposition of dialogical and monological discourse comes from Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of “dialogized heteroglossia” as “the authentic environment of an utterance,” in “Discourse in the Novel” (in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin, Tex., 1981], 272–275.) 43. The real-​­life inspiration for the character of Malcolm is referenced in Daniel Leonard’s “Massachusettensis” series, Letter 2: “One Malcom, a loyal subject, and as such, intitled [sic] to protection, the evening before the last winter sessions of the general court, was dragged out of his house, stript, tarred, and feathered, and carted several hours in the severest frost of that winter, to the utmost hazard of his life. He was carried to the gallows with an halter about his neck, and, in his passage to and from the gallows, was beaten with as cruel stripes as ever were administered by the hands of a savage” (Massachusetts Gazette; and the Boston Post Boy and Advertiser, Dec. 19, 1774). 44. Trumbull, M’Fingal (1782), 49. 45. Ibid., 51, 61–62, 51. 46. Ibid., 27. 47. Ibid., 72. 48. Howard, 203; Gimmestad, 103. 49. In the months leading up to Cornwallis’s surrender on October 19, 1781, the Royal Gazette published several ballads celebrating British military successes, including “On the Reduction of Charlestown by his Majesty’s Forces” (Aug. 1, 1781), and “A Song—​ ­the Xth Regiment’s voyage to Quebec” (Sept. 1, 1781); after this date, the only war ballads that appeared were those celebrating Sir George Rodney’s victory over the French in the Battle of the Saintes (“An Ode on Sir George Rodney’s Victory over the Comte de Grasse, Composed by a common Seaman on Board his Majesty’s Ship the Namur.—​­12th April, 1782” [June 8, 1782]; Samuel Whitchurch, “The Acquisition; or, Britannia Triumphant” [Oct. 16, 1782]; “Rodney’s Victory: A New Song” [Oct. 16, 1782]). 50. Winthrop Sargent, ed., The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Dr. Jonathan Odell; Relating to the American Revolution (Albany, N.Y., 1860), 87, 89. Among the poems Stansbury published are “Tradesmens’ Song for His Majesty’s Birthday, June 4th, 1777,” Pennsylvania Ledger, Oct. 22, 1777; [Untitled (“What times are these?”)], Pennsylvania Ledger, Dec. 10, 1777; “A New Song. Tune, Come, my kitten, my kitten, &c.,” Towne’s Pennsylvania Evening Post, Dec. 2, 1777.

Chapter 3 1. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 95. Richard Hofstadter described the Illuminati conspiracy theory as an early example of “the paranoid style” in American politics (The Paranoid Style

302   Notes to Pages 96–100 in American Politics and Other Essays [New York, 1965], 3–40). David Brion Davis counters that conspiracy theories have long occupied the mainstream of political thought, e.g., anti-​­Masonic conspiracy theories and “Slave Power” theories of antebellum Southern politics (Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-​­American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present [Ithaca, N.Y., 1971], xiii–xxiv, 9–22). Gordon Wood historicizes conspiracy discourse, arguing that eighteenth-​­century theories differ from their twentieth-​ ­century counterparts by reflecting an older logic of political cause and effect (“Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 [1982], 401–441). For a summary of the historiography on conspiracy discourse, see Michael William Pfau, The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (East Lansing, Mich., 2005), 1–18; for the connection between the Illuminati theory and early American fiction, see Bryan Waterman, “The Bavarian Illuminati, the Early American Novel, and Histories of the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62 (2005), 9–30. 2. Waterman, 9–10. The connection between conspiracy theories and early theories of ideology was first suggested by Louis Althusser, who distinguished the notion of ideology as an autonomous historical force from its cruder eighteenth-​­century precursor, in which kings and priests combined to forge “beautiful lies” to prevent the people from comprehending the truth of their condition (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster [London, 1971], 153–154). Gordon Wood adds that the Enlightenment mind conceived of historical effects as resulting from “autonomous, freely acting individuals . . . ​capable of directly and deliberately bringing about events” (“Conspiracy,” 409). 3. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (New York, 1975), 47; John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, vol. 2: Poems 1681–1684 (Los Angeles, 1972), 16–19; Alexander Pope, Complete Poems, ed. John Butt (New Haven, 1963), 721. For the specific influence of Paradise Lost on early American poets, see George Frank Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton, 1964). 4. Lewis Leary, That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure (New York, 1941), 53–60. 5. [Philip Freneau,] “General Gage’s Soliloquy. Published in New York by H. Gaine, in August 1775,” in The Poems of Philip Freneau. Written Chiefly During the Late War (Philadelphia, 1786), 67–71; [Philip Freneau,] General Gage’s Confession, Being the Substance of His Excellency’s last Conference, with his Ghostly Father, Friar Francis (New York, 1775). Freneau drew on the former as the basis for “King George the Third’s Soliloquy” (United States Magazine; a Repository of History, Politics and Literature [May 1779], 230), which depicts the king as a similarly tortured soul who vacillates between anxiety over losing the war and contemplations of violent retribution. The interchangeability of Freneau’s villains illustrates how both were versions of a common literary type, derived largely from Milton’s Satan as he is depicted during similar moments of self-​­doubt (see, e.g., Paradise Lost, 4.32–113 [79–81]. 6. [Philip Freneau,] A Voyage to Boston. A Poem (New York, 1775), 5, 7, 8. 7. Ibid., 8. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 169–176. For Warner, the early American novel is characterized by anxiety over the problem of “management of esteem” in republican society; this problem is frequently resolved, he adds, through a fantasy vision of republican society in which truth is ultimately publicized, usually in the form of an authoritative text, such as a newspaper or court document.

Notes to Pages 100–108   303 A similar fantasy pervades A Voyage to Boston, such that the poem presents itself as the textual means by which a conspiracy is made public. 8. [Freneau,] Voyage to Boston, 10, 11. 9. Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), 39. 10. [Freneau,] Voyage to Boston, 9, 19–20. 11. “The Whig. A Song,” Rivington’s New-​­York Gazetteer, Jan. 26, 1775. 12. [Myles Cooper,] The Patriots of North-​­America: A Sketch. With Explanatory Notes (New York, 1775); [Isaac Hunt,] Faction, a Sketch; or a Summary of the Causes of the present most unnatural and indefensible of all Rebellion’s [sic]; the very first excepted (New York, 1777). The poems belonging to this series of exchanges appeared almost exclusively in New York, pitting Freneau as the Patriot voice against a host of Loyalists, whose work was published chiefly by James Rivington. This initial satiric flurry was interrupted by Freneau’s decision to quit the colonies to serve as a ship’s officer in the Caribbean and the 1776 destruction of Rivington’s presses by a Patriot mob. 13. [Cooper,] The Patriots of North-​­America, 3. 14. Ibid., 6; Faction, a Sketch, 6; “From a Late London Paper,” Royal Gazette, Oct. 4, 1780. 15. “The Loyalists,” United States Magazine (July 1779), 315. 16. Ibid., 316. 17. Cynthia Dubin Edelberg, Jonathan Odell: Loyalist Poet of the Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1987), 127; [Jonathan Odell,] “The American Times, a Satire, in Three Parts. In which are Delineated the Characters of the Leaders of the American Rebellion,” in [John André,] Cow-​­Chace, in Three Cantos, Published on Occasion of the Rebel General Wayne’s Attack of the Refugees Block-​­House on Hudson’s River, On Friday the 21st of July, 1780 (New York, 1780), 31. 18. Odell, 32–33. 19. Ibid., 34, 37–38. 20. Ibid., 40–41, 42, 66–68. In his address to Washington, Odell draws specifically on Paradise Lost, Book 6, ll. 275–280: “Hence then, and evil go with thee along / Thy offspring, to the place of evil, hell, / Thou and thy wicked crew; there mingle broils, / Ere this avenging sword begin thy doom, / Or some more sudden vengeance winged from God / Precipitate thee with augmented pain” (133); Odell follows this allusion with an apology to Milton, which includes a comparison between the Revolution and Satan’s rebellion: “O Poet, seated on the lofty throne, / Forgive the bard who makes thy words his own; / Surpriz’d I trace in thy prophetic page / The crimes, the follies of the present age; / Thy scenery, sayings, admirable man, / Portray our struggles with the dark Divan” (42). 21. “Untitled” [“ARNOLD, thy name, as heretofore . . .”], Independent Ledger, and the American Advertiser, Oct. 23, 1780, rpt. in Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser (Philadelphia), Oct. 24, 1780, Continental Journal (Boston), Oct. 26, 1780, Massachusetts Spy: Or, the American Oracle of Liberty (Worcester), Oct. 26, 1780; “Dialogue between SATAN and ARNOLD,” New Jersey Gazette (Burlington), Nov. 1, 1780, rpt. American Journal and General Advertiser (Providence), Nov. 18, 1780; The Fall of Lucifer, an Elegiac Poem on the Infamous Defection of the Late General Arnold (Hartford, 1781), 5. See also “Untitled” [“Lines on the flight of Benedict Arnold”], Continental Journal (Oct. 5, 1780, rpt. in Norwich Packet and the Weekly Advertiser, Oct. 19, 1780; [“ ’Twas Arnold’s post, Sir Harry sought . . . ​,”], Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser, Oct. 24, 1780; [“WEEP,

304   Notes to Pages 108–113 British muse, o’er André’s grave!”], Independent Chronicle and the General Advertiser (Boston), Dec. 7, 1780; “To General Washington, on the late Conspiracy,” Norwich Packet, Jan. 16, 1781; [Philip Freneau,] “Rivington’s (alias Portable Soup) Last Will and Testament,” Freeman’s Journal: or, The North-​­American Intelligencer, Feb. 27, 1782, rpt. Massachusetts Spy, Mar. 28, 1782; “Ode Addressed to General Arnold,” Freeman’s Journal, May 29, 1782; “The Tenth Ode of Horace’s Book of Epodes, imitated. Written in December 1781, upon the departure of General Arnold from New York,” Freeman’s Journal, July 18, 1782. 22. “From a late London Paper. Arnold; or, a Question Answered,” Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser, July 17, 1781, rpt. American Journal and General Advertiser, Aug. 15, 1781. 23. [Phillis Wheatley,] Liberty and Peace, A Poem. By Phillis Peters (Boston, 1784), 2. 24. “The Return of Peace. A New Ode,” Pennsylvania Packet, Feb. 17, 1784; “On the Late Peace. Written for New-​­Year’s Day, 1784,” Norwich Packet, Jan. 1, 1784; “A New Song,” in To Perpetuate the Memory of Peace (Philadelphia, 1785), 5; David Humphreys, A Poem on the Happiness of America; Addressed to the Citizens of the United States (Hartford, 1786), 6. 25. Timothy Dwight, The Conquest of Canaan; A Poem in Eleven Books (Hartford, 1785); [Joel Barlow,] The Vision of Columbus, A Poem in Nine Books (Hartford, 1787). John McWilliams argues that this “epic moment” in American literary history is characterized by “static prophesies of utopia” (The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 [Cambridge, 1989], 42); for McWilliams’s analysis of Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan and Barlow’s Vision of Columbus, see also 43–66. 26. Congress circulated nearly $200 million between 1775 and 1779, when it enacted a law ceasing further issuance of federal paper money; by 1780, Congress had revalued federal currency at 2.5 percent of face value. From this point on, funding of the war fell to the states, which further weakened the confederation government. In addition, the requirement that congressional acts required unanimous consent of the states (written into the Articles of Confederation) made it nearly impossible to pass a new national funding plan; for example, when Congress attempted to pass a uniform duty on imports in 1781, Rhode Island rejected the measure to protect its own statewide duty (Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 [Oxford, 1982], 611–621; Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781– 1789 [New York, 1950], 63–65). 27. Norwich Packet or, the Country Journal, Aug. 10, 1786. See American Mercury (Hartford), July 24, 1786, for an account of the law requiring merchants to accept state paper. Some historians argue for the long-​­term efficacy of the paper money schemes (see, e.g., Daniel P. Jones, The Economic and Social Transformation of Rural Rhode Island, 1780– 1850 [Boston, 1992], 31–35; William G. McLoughlin, Rhode Island: A Bicentennial History [New York, 1978], 100–105), but most reports from 1786 reflect alarm both over the general economic theory of paper money (see, e.g., Thomas Paine, Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money. By the author of Common Sense [Philadelphia, 1786]) and over the civil unrest that resulted. Many contemporaries did not interpret the conflict as pitting rich creditors against poor debtors, arguing that many merchant creditors were also themselves debtors to others outside the state, who were demanding specie for payment (see, e.g., “For the Providence Gazette,” Providence Gazette, and Country Journal, Aug. 5, 1786). For a history of Shays’ rebellion, see David P. Szatzmary, Shays’

Notes to Pages 113–115   305 Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, Mass., 1980); Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia, 2002). 28. The Annapolis Convention’s call for a broader Constitutional Convention is quoted in Middlekauff, 621. Installments of “The Anarchiad” were reprinted in the following papers: Connecticut Courant, Daily Advertiser, Political, Historical, and Commercial (New York), Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), Weekly Monitor and Litchfield Town and Country Recorder, American Herald (Boston), Salem Mercury, New-​­Hampshire Spy (Portsmouth), Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), Massachusetts Gazette (Boston), and New-​ ­ ork Journal, and Weekly Register. Trumbull’s commentary on the political influence of the Y series is quoted in William K. Bottorff, ed., The Anarchiad: A New England Poem. Written in Concert by David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins. Edited in 1861 by Luther G. Riggs (Gainesville, Fla., 1967), vii; for similar tributes, see also vi–viii. 29. Nearly half of the lines from the first installment of “The Anarchiad” contain allu“Lo! thy dread Empire, sions to The Dunciad; compare, e.g., Dunciad 4.653–654—​­ CHAOS! is restor’d; / Light dies before thy uncreated word” (The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt [New Haven, 1963], 800)—​­to these lines from “The Anarchiad”: “Thy constitution, Chaos, is restor’d; / Law sinks before thy uncreated word”; the abundance of allusions leads the annotator to state ironically “that the celebrated English poet, Mr. Pope, has proven himself a noted plagiarist, by copying the preceding ideas, and even couplets almost entire, into his famous poem called ‘The Dunciad’ ” (“American Antiquities, [No. I],” New-​­Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut Magazine, Oct. 26, 1786). 30. “American Antiquities, [No. I].” The looseness of the form allowed contributors to include, within the larger “American Antiquities” frame, satiric pieces that are not part of “The Anarchiad,” such as “American Antiquities,” No. 5, “Extract from Miscellaneous Papers Found in the Same Fort with the Anarchiad” (New-​­Haven Gazette, Jan. 25, 1787), and No. 8, “A Brief Account of the Death of that celebrated Personage, William Wimble, and of his Last Words and Dying Speech” (Mar. 22, 1787). 31. “The following is said to be the genuine copy of a letter from a poet in one part of the State to a poet in another part, of this State” [“William Wimble,”] New-​­Haven Gazette, Oct. 12, 1786; “The following is said to be the genuine copy of an intercepted letter . . . ​ from a patriot in one part of this state . . . ​,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Oct. 19, 1786; “The following is said to be the genuine copy of an intercepted letter . . . ​in answer to the letter from a poet in one part to a poet in another part of this State . . . ​,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Oct. 19, 1786; “To the Good People of Connecticut” [“Benevolence, Jr.”], “As I sat plodding at my taper” [“Trustless Fox”], New-​­Haven Gazette, Nov. 23, 1786; “To Benevolence, Jr.” [“Benevolence, Sr.”], New Haven Gazette, Dec. 14, 1786; “Text. When the Fox preaches let the Geese beware. To Benevolence, Jr. alias Grey Goose, the younger,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Dec. 21, 1786; “The News-​­Boys; an Eclogue for January, 1787,” “The News-​­Boy’s Apology for the foregoing Verses,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 1, 1787; “Advice to the Wits & Poets. From Freneau’s Poem to Spectator, with variations for the Latitude and Longitude of Connecticut,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Jan. 25, 1787. 32. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia, 2001), 44, 51; “American Antiquities, [No. I].” Giles argues that because of the “multifaceted” nature of “The Anarchiad,” readers should focus their attention more on “the form in which the text is enunciated” than the “obvious

306   Notes to Pages 115–122 moralizing content,” and particularly on the way in which the form “compromises the manifest content.” For more on the interpretive difficulties arising from the complex nature of “The Anarchiad,” see J. K. Van Dover, “The Design of Anarchy: The Anarchiad, 1786–1787,” Early American Literature 24.3 (1989), 237–247. 33. “American Antiquities, [No. I]”; “American Antiquities, No. IV,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Jan. 11, 1787. The same motif of providing an extrahistorical perspective on the present is found in other works published during the Confederation crisis; see, e.g., [Timothy Dwight,] [“An Essay on the Judgment of History Concerning America,”] New-​­Haven Gazette, Apr. 12, 1787. 34. “American Antiquities, No. X,” New-​­Haven Gazette, May 24, 1787. This was not the final installment of the series—​­two more would appear, on Aug. 16 and Sept. 13, respectively. But neither of the excerpts from these numbers deals with the political issues emphasized in the first ten. Readers commonly regard the final two installments as anticlimactic addenda to a series that effectively “concludes” with the Philadelphia Convention (see Howard, 195; Van Dover, 244). 35. “American Antiquities, No. X”; William C. Dowling, “Joel Barlow and The Anarchiad,” Early American Literature 25.1 (1990), 27. 36. “American Antiquities, [No. I]”; “American Antiquities, No. III,” Dec. 28, 1786. For a discussion of the problem of self-​­interest in connection to the constitutional debate, see Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 243–270. Consistent with the long-​­standing historiographical tendency to distinguish Federalists from Anti-​­Federalists according to social or economic class, both Shays’ rebellion and the paper money crisis have traditionally been interpreted in a way that fits these categories (see, e.g., Szatzmary, xi–xiv; McLoughlin, 101–102). In contrast, Leonard L. Richards argues that those who participated in the insurrection were not necessarily more impoverished or in debt than those who did not; rather, factors such as town and clan are more accurate indicators of participation (89–116). No similar reevaluation of the paper money crisis exists, though contemporary newspaper accounts complicate the suggestion that paper money advocates were primarily poor farmers and paper money critics were wealthy urban merchants; see, e.g., “For the Providence Gazette.” 37. “American Antiquities, No. 4.” 38. Carroll Smith-​­Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: the Birth of an American National Identity [Chapel Hill, 2010], 106–112. Whereas Smith-​­Rosenberg emphasizes the extent to which magazine writers of the time sought to portray the Shays’ rebels in terms of class and gender, as giving in to what was broadly viewed as an “effeminate” tendency to be drawn to luxury, the critique of Shays’ and his allies in “The Anarchiad” is a strictly moral argument (although there are underlying connections between the moral and gendered aspects of the eighteenth-​­century conception of virtue). 39. “American Antiquities, No. VI,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Feb. 22, 1787. 40. Quoted in Howard, 193. 41. Connecticut Courant, Oct. 9, 1786; “The following is said to be the genuine copy of a letter . . .” [“William Wimble,”] New-​­Haven Gazette, Oct. 12, 1786. 42. “The following is said to be the genuine copy of an intercepted letter . . .”; “To the good Citizens of Connecticut,” Connecticut Journal (New Haven), Oct. 25, 1786. 43. “American Antiquities, No. 2,” New-​­Haven Gazette, Nov. 2, 1786; [“Benevolence, Jr.”]; [“Benevolence, Sr.”]. Giles refers to the passage quoted above as an example of the internal contradictions governing “The Anarchiad” as a whole, writing that the Wits here sat-

Notes to Pages 122–134   307 irize Wimble’s call for pens and tongues to “wake the factious flame,” but that they are themselves implicated in this same critique. As suggested above, however, the passage is not a satiric attack against the practice of engaging in political satire but a taunt based, first, on their tongue-​­in-​­cheek reference to him as a “writer” (referring to the publishing of his secret letter) and, second, on the Wits’ confidence in the superiority of their skills as satirists. 44. [“Benevolence, Jr.”] 45. As Barlow writes in the introduction, as Columbus was “laying the foundation of [Spain’s] future grandeur in South America, some discontented persons, . . . ​together with his former enemies in that Kingdom, conspired to accomplish his ruin”; such enemies excited “the jealousy of their sovereigns” by “represent[ing] to the King and Queen” that Columbus would “trample on the Royal Authority and bid defiance to the Spanish power” (Vision of Columbus, xvii–xviii). Other examples in the poem of progress impeded by a conspiracy to uphold the status quo include an account of Galileo’s discoveries, silencing, and arrest, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-​­Reformation, and the settlement of New England and subsequent imperial attempts to limit Americans’ liberties. For an analysis of The Vision as a tribute to Enlightenment thought and the ideal of progressive history, see Howard, 306–326; William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens, Ga., 1990), 95–126.

Chapter 4 1. [George Richards,] The Declaration of Independence; a Poem: Accompanied by Odes, Songs, &c. Adapted to the Day. By a Citizen of Boston (Boston, 1793), 6, 15. 2. Ibid., 18. The divergence between the cyclical and linear progressive theories of history was first identified as an important element in early Republican poetry by John Griffith (“ ‘The Columbiad’ and ‘Greenfield Hill’: History, Poetry, and Ideology in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Early American Literature 10 [1975–1976], 235–250). William C. Dowling connects the cyclical view to English Country ideology and classical republicanism and the linear progressive view to Enlightenment thought (“Joel Barlow and the Anarchiad,” Early American Literature 25 [1990], 18–33; Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut [Athens, Ga., 1990], 42–47, 100–121). 3. Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World (Boston, 1784), 4. 4. [Philip Freneau,] “On the American and French Revolutions,” New-​­York Daily Gazette, Mar. 16, 1790. 5. [Philip Freneau,] “Lines occasioned by reading Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man,” Daily Advertiser (New York), May 27, 1791. 6. Joel Barlow, The Conspiracy of Kings; A Poem. Addressed to the Inhabitants of Europe, from Another Quarter of the World (London, 1792; rpt. Paris, 1793). The first American edition appeared in A Letter to the National Convention of France, on the Defects in the Constitution of 1791, and the Extent of the Amendments which ought to be applied. To which is Added The Conspiracy of Kings, a Poem (New York, 1793). Citations from the poem refer to the London edition. 7. Ibid., 8, 15. 8. Ibid., 15–16. 9. Ibid., 17; [Freneau,] “Lines occasioned by Reading Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man;” [Philip Freneau,] “The Loyalists,” United States Magazine (July 1779), 315.

308   Notes to Pages 134–141 10. “Addressed by the Boy who Carries the American Mercury, to the Subscribers,” American Mercury, Jan. 7, 1793; “The Captive King,” Gazette of the United States, May 18, 1793; [Sarah Wentworth Morton,] “For the Columbian Centinel” [“The Captive Queen”], Columbian Centinel, May 15, 1793; “Louis Capet has Lost his Caput,” National Gazette, Apr. 20, 1793. 11. The Decree of the Sun; or, France Regenerated. A Poem, in Three Cantos. The First Offering of a Youthful Muse (Boston, 1793), 6. 12. Ibid., 8, 12, 16. A similar image of brutality directed at innocents is found in an English translation of “La Marseillaise” that describes the advance of the “tyrant throng” as culminating in the act of tearing “prattling babes” from their mothers’ arms and leaving them to “bleeding die” (“Marche des Marseillois. Attempted in English,” Aurora General Advertiser [Philadelphia], Jul. 13, 1793). 13. Keith Michael Baker, “Introduction,” The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4: The Terror, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Bingley, U.K., 1994), xiii; “For the Philadelphia Gazette,” Philadelphia Gazette, Jan. 23, 1794; this account of the Terror, said to have been brought back to America by one Captain Culver, was reprinted widely. 14. [Lemuel Hopkins,] “To all Christian People: more especially those who take the Connecticut Courant,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 6, 1794; [Hopkins,] “To all Christian People: more especially those who take the Connecticut Courant,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 5, 1795. 15. “For the Apollo, &c.,” Apollo; or, Chestertown Spy, May 3, 1793; “New-​­Castle Civic Festival,” Aurora General Advertiser, May 12, 1794. For more on the connection between the rhetoric and ideals of the French Revolution and those of the emerging Democratic Societies, see James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic (New Haven, 1993), 85–89; Eugene Link, Democratic-​­Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York, 1942), 53–54, 125–130. 16. [Joel Barlow,] “A New Song, called The Guillotine,” Greenleaf ’s New York Journal, Oct. 18, 1794; “God Save the Rights of Man” appeared under several titles in the days following the testimonial dinner for Genêt at which it was first sung, including “A New Song, to an Old Tune—​­‘God Save the King’ ” (Argus [Boston], May 21, 1793), “Song” (Aurora General Advertiser, June 4, 1793), and “New Ode—​­To a popular tune” (National Gazette, June 5, 1793). Barlow’s “The Guillotine” was parodied by critics of the French Revolution in “A New Song, Called ‘The Guillotine’ ” (Columbian Centinel, Oct. 11, 1794), which sarcastically turns the praise of the guillotine from the earlier version back onto Revolutionary leaders, such as Robespierre, whose execution had since been reported. 17. [Philip Freneau,] “The Republican Genius of Europe,” Jersey Chronicle, May 23, 1795. 18. Of the “minor” or second-​­generation Connecticut Wits, Hopkins and Alsop were the most prolific. In addition to “The Anarchiad” and “The Echo,” Hopkins penned New Year’s verses for the Connecticut Courant throughout the 1790s under such headings as “To all Christian People” (1794–1795) and “Guillotina” (1796–1799). As noted in my Introduction, he would enlarge “The Echo, No. XI” into The Democratiad (1795). Alsop was probably the organizing member of the “Echo” group and the editor of the collected edition of the series, The Echo, With Other Poems (New York, 1807). His political verse includes another New Year’s collaboration with Hopkins, The Political Green-​­House, For the Year

Notes to Pages 141–151   309 1798 (Hartford, 1799), and the complex political burlesque Aristocracy. An Epic Poem (Philadelphia, 1795). In addition to numerous nonpolitical poems, Elihu Hubbard Smith has been identified by Benjamin Franklin V as the author of Democracy: An Epic Poem, By Aquiline Nimble-​­Chops, Democrat (New York, 1794); for two recent studies of Smith’s prose works, see Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect (Baltimore, 2007); Katherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2008). Theodore Dwight, younger brother of Timothy Dwight, wrote “The Triumph of Democracy” (1801). Mason Fitch Cogswell is sometimes mentioned alongside these figures as a contributor to “The Echo”; he is cited by Leon Howard as the author of the series “The Versifier,” which imitated “The Echo” in form and content (Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago, 1943), 201. 19. Alsop, “Preface,” The Echo, With Other Poems, iii; “The Echo, No. I,” American Mercury, Aug. 8, 1791. 20. “The Echo, No. I.” For Adam Smith’s argument concerning the relationship between affect and conscience, see, e.g., The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976), 153–156. 21. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Lawrence E. Klein, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), 298. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, in The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven, 1963), 791. 22. The Della Cruscans took their name from Robert Merry’s pseudonym, “Della Crusca,” and included Merry, Piozzi, Bertie Greatheed, Hannah Cowley, and others. Gifford satirized their writings first in The Baviad (1791) and then again in The Maeviad (1795) as exemplary of a “growing depravity of the public taste” (The Baviad, and Maeviad. By William Gifford, Esq. [Philadelphia, 1799], xx). For more on the Della Cruscan controversy and its political implications, see W. N. Hargreaves-​­Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans and Their Time, 1783–1828 (The Hague, 1967), 244–280; Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford, 1996), 74–75. 23. [Abraham Bishop,] “The Truth, No. I,” Argus (Boston), Aug. 5, 1791. “The Echo, No. IV,” American Mercury, Oct. 3, 1791. 24. Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia, 2012), 1–10, 37–41, 124–128. “The Echo, No. IX,” American Mercury, Jan. 14, 1793. 25. “The Echo, No. IX.” For more on how Federalists regarded themselves as more socially liberal in some ways than their Democratic-​­Republican counterparts, see William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (Columbia, S.C., 1999), who notes how Joseph Dennie and his fellow Port Folio writers painted their Republican opponents as heirs to Cromwell’s zealous Puritanism, while describing themselves as artistically and culturally tolerant. For the implications of such views on the role of women in polite society, see Rosemarie Zagarri, “Gender and the First Party System,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-​­Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville, 1998), 118–134. 26. “The Echo, No. X,” American Mercury, Jan. 21, 1793. 27. “The Echo, No. XII,” American Mercury, May 6, 1793; “For the Daily Advertiser,” Daily Advertiser (New York), Oct. 25, 1793; “Answer of a Frank, to . . . ​Americanus in the Daily Advertiser,” Diary, or Loudon’s Register (New York), Oct. 29, 1793; “The Echo, No. XVI,” American Mercury, Nov. 11, 1793. 28. [St. George Tucker,] The Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar, Esq. (Philadelphia,

310   Notes to Pages 151–158 1796), 91–92. For Freneau’s earlier satires against “The Echo,” see, e.g., “Receipt to Make an Echo Writer” (National Gazette, Mar. 29, 1792); “Ode to the Echo Writer” (National Gazette, Apr. 2, 1792). Both poems were retaliations for an attack against him in “The Echo, No. VII,” which describes him as “The blackguard’s pattern, and the great man’s fool, / The fawning parasite, and minion’s tool” (American Mercury, Mar. 12, 1792). 29. H. H. Brackenridge, “Farther and concluding Thoughts on the Indian War,” National Gazette, Feb. 6, 1792. 30. “The Echo, No. VII.” 31. Ibid. 32. “To Pocahunta, let my lyre be strung,” New-​­York Journal, & Patriotic Register, Oct. 12, 1790; “The News Lad’s Address to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 2, 1792. 33. Eli Lewis, St. Clair’s Defeat. A Poem (Harrisburg, 1792); “Addressed by the Carrier of the American Mercury, to the Subscribers,” American Mercury, Jan. 9, 1792. For another example of a poem sympathetic to the predicament of the Miami tribes, see “The Indian Warrior’s Lamentation” (American Mercury, Jan. 2, 1792). 34. “News Lad’s Address to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant” [1792]; “Addressed by the Carrier of the American Mercury” [1792]. 35. The appearance of antislavery poems in the public sphere in the late 1780s corresponds with Matthew Mason’s general account of the early antislavery movement in America as more often articulated in moral or religious than overtly political terms, and inspired in large part by the more active, vocal antislavery movement in Britain (Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic [Chapel Hill, 2006], 13). For American reprints of British antislavery poems, see, e.g., Hannah More, Slavery, A Poem (Philadelphia, 1788); Aura; or The Slave. A poem, in two cantos. Dedicated to John Carr, L.L.D. Master of the Grammar School, Hertford (Philadelphia, 1788); William Cowper, “The Negroe’s Complaint,” Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, Oct. 1, 1790; Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq.,” Columbian Centinel, Dec. 17, 1791; [Bishop Thomas Coke,] The Religious Impostor Unmask’d; a satirical poem, In Three Parts (Charleston, S.C., 1795). Other poems on slavery from this period include: William Roscoe, The Wrongs of Africa, a poem (Philadelphia, 1788); “The Negro’s Prayer,” Gazette of the United States, Dec. 12, 1789; The History of Inkle and Yariko (Bennington, Vt., 1790); “On Slavery, and the Slave Trade,” Monitor (Litchfield, Conn.), Feb. 15, 1792; Freneau, “The Island Field Negro,” Daily Advertiser, Feb. 1, 1791; [“Simplicia,”] “Negro Love Elegy,” Columbian Centinel, Oct. 3, 1792; “The Dying African,” New-​­York Journal, & Patriotic Register, Feb. 27, 1793; “The African,” General Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 30, 1794. 36. “From Hispaniola,” Vermont Journal and the Universal Advertiser (Windsor, Vt.), Oct. 25, 1791; “Sanguinary News! From Hispaniola,” New-​­Hampshire Gazette & General Advertiser (Portsmouth, N.H.), Oct. 6, 1791; “News Lad’s Address to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant” [1792]. For American anxiety over the Haitian Revolution, see Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley, 1993), 182; Mason, 29. 37. [Theodore Dwight,] “The Triumph of Democracy; A Poem” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 5, 1801. Bishop published “The Rights of Black Men” under the pseudonym “John Paul Martin” (see Argus, Nov. 22, 25, Dec. 5, 1791). For more on Federalist and Republican policies regarding Haiti, see Mason, 29–31; Paul Finkelman, “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Federalism,” in Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), 149–152;

Notes to Pages 158–170   311 Gary Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston, 2003), 33–46; Zuckerman, 185. 38. Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), Jan. 5, 1793; “Addressed by the Boy who carries the American Mercury, to the Subscribers,” American Mercury, Jan. 7, 1793. 39. The Wits were singled out for a rare instance of praise for this satire by the editors of the Virginia Chronicle: “We have mentioned in a former Paper, Governor Hancock’s . . . ​ giving a Ball to the Free Negroes: such liberal conduct has justly incurred on him the sarcastic effusions of Yankee Wits” (Virginia Chronicle and Norfolk and Portsmouth General Advertiser, Mar. 2, 1793). 40. Finkelman, 154; Mason, 64; “The Echo, No. X.” 41. [John Sylvester John Gardiner,] “Remarks from the Jacobiniad—​­No. V,” Federal Orrery (Boston), Jan. 1, 1795. 42. [Gardiner,] “Remarks . . . ​No. VII,” Federal Orrery, Jan. 12, 1794; [Gardiner,] “Remarks . . . ​No. IX,” Jan. 19, 1794. For Jefferson’s description of the differences between the races, see Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings (New York, 1984), 264–265. 43. [Lemuel Hopkins,] Guillotina, For the year 1798. Addressed to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant (Hartford, 1797). 44. Jefferson, Writings, 264. Guillotina, For the Year 1798. 45. Philadelphia Gazette & Daily Advertiser, Sept. 17, 1800; [Thomas Green Fessenden,] Democracy Unveiled; Or, Tyranny stripped of the Garb of Patriotism. By Christopher Caustic, L.L.D. (Boston, 1805), 107, 106. For more on Federalist outrage over the implications of the three-​­fifths clause, see Wills, 1–13; Mason, 37–40. 46. “The Times, No. VI,” American Minerva, and the New-​­York (Evening) Advertiser, Apr. 16, 1794. Mason argues that it is a mistake to discount such antislavery sentiments by emphasizing their political dimension. Though antislavery could be used to bolster Federalism as a political philosophy, it was also sincerely held. Northern whites in general, he writes, took “immense pride in living in the free states,” and more particularly, “in having acted on the libertarian premise of the American Revolution” by passing laws abolishing slavery in their own states (27). 47. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Stanzas for the Times,” The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 3 (New York, 1892), 37, 35. Mason traces the rhetorical and ideological continuity between Federalism and the various third-​­party abolitionist movements of the decades that followed (213–237) and concludes, “The Republican Party that arose in the superheated atmosphere of the 1850s was the most successful descendent of the Federalist sectionalists of the 1810s (215).

Chapter 5 1. [Edward Church,] The Dangerous Vice ‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑. A Fragment. Addressed to all whom it may concern. By a Gentleman, Formerly of Boston (“Columbia” [Boston], 1789), 5, 8, 10. 2. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (New York, 1993), 46–50, 531–537; David McCullough, John Adams (New York, 2001), 132–134, 404–408. 3. [Church,] 14, 11, 13. 4. Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 2009), 128–137, 148–164. 5. “Stanzas on the arrival of Congress in Philadelphia, December 1790,” New-​­ Jersey

312   Notes to Pages 170–178 Journal, and Political Intelligencer, Dec. 15, 1790. For songs celebrating political unity, see, e.g., “A Federal Song. For the Anniversary of American Independence,” Gazette of the United States, June 20, 1789; “Ode Sung on the Arrival of the President of the United States,” Gazette of the United States, Apr. 22, 1789. For a political analysis of the Grand Federal Processions, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1997), 90–102. 6. For a contemporary example of this moral grievance, see “Soldiers and Creditors,” Independent Chronicle, Apr. 15, 1790; see also Elkins and McKitrick, 114–118; James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, 1993), 35. 7. [Freneau,] “The American Soldier,” Daily Advertiser (New York), Jan. 24, 1791. 8. “On the Subscription to the National Bank on the 4th of July, the Fifteenth Anniversary of American Independence,” United States Chronicle (Providence, R.I.), July 21, 1791; “The Bank Script Bubble, an Alter’d Song,” Columbian Centinel, Aug. 24, 1791; “The Speculators Soliloquy on the fluctuating state of Bank Stock and six per cents,” Daily Advertiser, Aug. 18, 1791. Other poems on the establishment of the National Bank and speculation include “Bank of the United States,” Gazette of the U.S., Apr. 6, 1791; “Speculation,” Gazette of the U.S., Aug. 10, 1791; “A Song. [Tune—​­Damme there’s nothing like Grog], Argus (Boston), Aug. 23, 1791. For an account of the Bank Scrip Bubble of 1791, see Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), 357–361; Elkins and McKitrick, 242–244. 9. The Glass; or, Speculation: A Poem. Containing an Account of the Ancient, and Genius of the Modern, Speculators (New York, 1791) 3, 5, 2. For examples of poems and ballads on the South Sea Bubble, see Swift, “The Bubble” and “The Bank Thrown Down,” Poems of Jonathan Swift, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1958), 248–259, 286–288. Importantly, poems composed by critics of the administration, decrying stock speculation, were countered throughout by poems composed by Federalist poets decrying land speculation; see, e.g., “Addressed by the Carrier of the American Mercury, to the Subscribers,” American Mercury, Jan. 9, 1792; [Richard Alsop, Lemuel Hopkins, and Theodore Dwight,] The Political Green-​­House, For the Year 1798 (Hartford, 1799). 10. “The Glass,” 9. 11. [Freneau,] “The Speculator,” National Gazette, Sept. 19, 1792. 12. For more on of Duer’s career and role as moral exemplar of the evils of speculation, see Robert F. Jones, The King of the Alley: William Duer: Politician, Entrepreneur, and Speculator 1768–1799 (Philadelphia, 1992), 141–178; Chernow, 379–384; Elkins and McKitrick, 272–276. 13. “To Mr. James Blanchard,” National Gazette, Jan. 9, 1793. Note the similarity between the language of Freneau’s “The Speculator,” above, and that of the Fellow Laborer letter: “The whole herd of speculators, from the first man in the government, to the despicable wretch who prowling thro’ the country for prey, has bought the soldiers or the widow’s mite for a song, shall crouch and refund their ill-​­gotten gains.” For more on Hamilton’s funding scheme and Giles’s investigation of it, see Chernow, 382–384, 426; Elkins and McKitrick, 276, 295, 300. 14. “The Echo, No. XI,” American Mercury, Feb. 25, 1793. 15. Ibid. 16. “The Versifier—​­No. I,” Connecticut Courant, Feb. 4, 1793. 17. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 180–188   313 18. For the Philadelphia newspaper war, see Jeffrey Pasley, “The Two National Gazettes: Newspapers and the Embodiment of American Political Parties,” Early American Literature 35 (2000), 51–86; Elkins and McKitrick, 282–292. 19. [Freneau,] “Pomposo and his Printer,” New-​­York Journal, & Patriotic Register, Jul. 16, 1791. 20. Noting Freneau’s government salary during the period he was editing the National Gazette, Hamilton asks, “Quere—​­Whether this salary is paid for translations; or for publications, the design of which is to vilify those to whom the voice of people committed the administration of our public affairs” (Gazette of the United States, Jul. 25, 1792). Freneau’s role as the originator of antiadministration poems that would later be reprinted in other newspapers is seen, for instance, in the publication history of “The Speculator,” which first appeared in the National Gazette on Sept. 19, 1792, and was soon reprinted in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer (Sept. 22), the Catskill Packet (Oct. 1), the Massachusetts Spy (Oct. 4), the Columbian Centinel (Oct. 6), and the North-​­Carolina Journal (Nov. 21). Freneau’s emphasis on poetry as a major aspect of the paper’s content may also account for the increased number of poems in other proto-​­Republican newspapers after the appearance of the National Gazette. 21. [St. George Tucker,] “Probationary Odes: By Jonathan Pindar, Esq. a cousin of Peter’s; and candidate for the post of Poet-​­Laureat, Ode I. To all the great folks in a lump,” National Gazette, June 1, 1793. 22. [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes” [I]. The many reprints of Peter Pindar’s works in America include The Poetical Works of Peter Pindar (Philadelphia, 1789, 1790, 1792, 1794; Newburyport, Mass., 1790); The Works of Peter Pindar (New York, 1793, 1794); Pindariana; or Peter’s Portfolio, containing tale, fable, translation, ode, elegy, epigram, song, pastoral, letters . . . ​(Philadelphia, 1794). 23. [John Wolcot,] “Peter’s Apology,” The Poetical Works of Peter Pindar, Esq. A Distant Relation to the poet of Thebes. To which are prefixed, memoirs and anecdotes of the author, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1792), 188. [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes” [I]. 24. William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-​­Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, 1991), 150–151. 25. [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes” [I]. 26. [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes . . . ​Ode VII. To the Well-​­Born,” National Gazette, July 3, 1793; [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes . . . ​Ode II. To Atlas,” National Gazette, June 5, 1793. 27. [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes . . . ​Ode V. To a Truly Great Man,” National Gazette, June 22, 1793; [Tucker,] “Probationary Odes . . . ​Ode VIII. To Minos,” National Gazette, Jul. 20, 1793. Tucker gained a national reputation as a legal scholar after the publication of Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference, to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States; and of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1803). 28. Sharp, 85; [Tucker,] “The Probationary Odes . . . ​Ode X. To the Democratical Society of Philadelphia,” National Gazette, Aug. 21, 1793. 29. [Tucker,] The Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar, Esq. (Philadelphia, 1796), 81, 83. 30. Ibid., 71–73. 31. Ibid., 53, 92. 32. For Dennie’s editorship of the Port Folio, see Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson (Columbia, S.C., 1999); for Dennie’s editorship of the Farmer’s Weekly

314   Notes to Pages 188–198 Museum, see Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2008), 114–139; Harold Milton Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle: A Study in American Literature from 1782 to 1812 (Austin, Tex., 1915), 85–109. 33. [Tucker,] Probationary Odes, 30; “An Address to the Demagogues of Sedition, throughout the Union. By Peter Hothead, Esq. L.L.D. Poet Laureate to a Democratic Society, lately founded at Pilfertown, County of Rumshire,” Newhampshire and Vermont Journal: Or, the Farmer’s Weekly Museum, Dec. 15, 1795. For an example of Peter Pindar’s satires of the proponents of the French Revolution, see, e.g., “Ode to Mr. Paine, Author of ‘The Rights of Man,’ ” Poetical Works, vol. 2, 238–239; “Hymn to the Guillotine,” Pindariana, 4. 34. [Isaac Story,] “From the Shop of Peter Quince. A Marvelous Ode,” Farmer’s Weekly Museum: Newhampshire and Vermont Journal, Oct. 9, 1797. 35. Sharp, 117. See also Elkins and McKitrick, 415–422; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 2009), 197–199. 36. For poems for and against the Jay Treaty, see, e.g., “Inscribed to his Excellency John Jay,” Columbian Centinel, July 22, 1795; [Philip Freneau,] “A Poem on Jay’s Treaty,” in An Emetic for Aristocrats! Or a Chapter, respecting Governor Jay, and his treaty (Boston, 1795), 19–23; “Mr. Jay’s Treaty,” Jersey Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1795; “A Typographical Eclogue,” Federal Orrery, Jan. 8, 1795. 37. “For the New York Journal, &c.,” Greenleaf ’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, Feb. 12, 1794; [Untitled (“The Citizens of New York”),] Columbian Gazetteer (New York), Feb. 27, 1794. 38. “For the Daily Advertiser,” Daily Advertiser, Mar. 1, 1794; “Town-​­Meeting,” Greenleaf ’s New York Journal, Mar. 1, 1794. 39. John McWilliams, The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 (Cambridge, 1989), 71; [Elihu Hubbard Smith?] Democracy: An Epic Poem, by Aquiline Nimble-​ ­Chops, Democrat (New York, [1794]), 5. For the argument that M’Fingal satirizes a “community of speakers,” see Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-​­Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, 1999), 311–318. 40. [Smith?] Democracy, 5, 6–7, 18, 10–11. 41. Ibid., 15, 2. The identification of Aquiline Nimble-​­Chops as Brockholst Livingston probably arose from the copy of Democracy reproduced in the Evans collection, which includes penciled annotations of many of the anonymous figures satirized. Probably for this same reason, Evans mistakenly attributes the poem to Livingston (an impossibility given that the poem satirizes Democrats in general and several members of Livingston’s family in particular). Benjamin Franklin V attributes the poem to Elihu Hubbard Smith, but this has not been independently confirmed (The Poetry of the Minor Connecticut Wits [Gainesville, Fla., 1970], vi). Though Smith does not mention the poem in his Diary, it was published during a period covered in the portion of the original manuscript that Smith destroyed (James E. Cronin, ed., The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith [1771–1798] [Philadelphia, 1973], 1). 42. “Extracts from Canto Second,” in The Echo, With Other Poems, ed. Alsop ([New York,] 1807), 200–207. 43. “Aristocracy, an Epic Poem—​­Book First, This Day Published,” Aurora and General Advertiser, Feb. 6, 1795. 44. Aristocracy. An Epic Poem (Philadelphia, 1795), iii–iv. 45. Ibid., 8, iv.

Notes to Pages 198–211   315 46. Ibid., 9; Aristocracy: Book Second (Philadelphia, 1795), 12–14. The poem is also significant for highlighting the political and personal rivalry between Burr and Hamilton (already well known in New York by 1795), as Aristus curses the fact that Washington gave Hamilton special treatment during the Revolution (12–13). 47. Aristocracy. An Epic Poem, 13. 48. Aristocracy: Book Second, 6–9. During the negotiations of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, Jay suspected Vergennes of secretly working on behalf of France’s ally, Spain, to undermine claims to the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. In response, Jay moved to negotiate a separate peace with Britain—​­a tactic that ultimately brought France and Spain back to the table and secured the Western Territories for the United States. For more on this episode, see Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1967), 206–207; Orville T. Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787 (Albany, N.Y., 1982), 382–394. 49. [Untitled,] Aurora and General Advertiser, June 22, 1795; see also Sharp, 117–123; Elkins and McKitrick, 418–422. 50. [Freneau,] “Mr. Jay’s Treaty,” Jersey Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1795. 51. “For the Aurora,” Aurora General Advertiser, June 29, 1795; “The Echo, No. XVIII,” Connecticut Courant, Aug. 17, 1795. 52. [Lemuel Hopkins,] The Democratiad, A Poem, in Retaliation, for the “Philadelphia Jockey Club” (Philadelphia, 1795), 19. 53. Ibid., 8–9. 54. For an account of the Federalist petition campaign in support of the Jay Treaty and its effect on the decision by House Republicans to give up their opposition to funding the measure, see Sharp, 127–133.

Chapter 6 1. Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 2009), 240. 2. [Philip Freneau,] “On the Proposed American Negotiation with the French Republic,” Time-​­Piece, and Literary Companion, June 7, 1797. 3. [Untitled (“Illustrious Buonaparte”),] Independent Chronicle: and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), Nov. 7, 1796; [Freneau,] “On the Progress of the French Armies in Italy,” Time-​­Piece, Apr. 26, 1797. Bonaparte would be celebrated in Republican newspapers right up to the moment of his 1799 coup d’état; see, e.g., “The Trial of Freedom‑‑‑a Fragment, Presented with the congratulations of the season, by the carrier of the Connecticut Journal, to his patrons,” Connecticut Journal, Dec. 28, 1796; “Acrostic. Impromptu on Buonaparte,” Greenleaf ’s New York Journal, & Patriotic Register, Apr. 19, 1797; “To Buonaparte,” Independent Chronicle, Oct. 10, 1799. For a literary critique of Bonaparte, see “An Address to Buonaparte,” South-​­Carolina State Gazette, and Timothy’s Daily Advertiser, Apr. 15, 1799. 4. [Timothy Dwight,] “An Extract from The Retrospect,” Mercury and New-​­England Palladium (Boston), Jan. 3, 1801. As Dwight writes in the poem’s headnote, he composed it in 1796 and 1797 but set it aside until 1801, when he decided that its subject matter was still relevant to his countrymen (perhaps in light of the results of the recent presidential election). For a more detailed discussion of the poem, see Colin Wells, The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), 142–150.

316   Notes to Pages 212–217 5. [Dwight,] “Retrospect.” Dwight’s interpretation of the Revolution, particularly his comparison of the rituals surrounding the Goddess of Liberty to the idolatry of the ancient Egyptians, was probably influenced by Noah Webster’s Revolution in France, Considered in Respect to Its Progress and Effects. By an American (New York, 1794): “The passion of the Egyptians will be called superstition, perhaps; the passions of our people, enthusiasm. But it is the object that is changed, and not the principle. . . . ​[N]or is it less an act of superstition to dance round a cap or pole in honor of liberty, than it was in Egypt to sacrifice a bullock to Isis” (23). 6. [Dwight,] “Retrospect.” 7. [Lemuel Hopkins,] Guillotina For the Year 1798. Addressed to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant (Hartford, 1797). The work by Richard Brothers that Hopkins references is A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, Particularly of the Present Time, the Present War, and the Prophesy now Fulfilling (Philadelphia, 1795). 8. The Bavarian Illuminati society was founded in 1776 for the purpose of opposing what its founder, Professor Adam Weishaupt, described as political and ecclesiastical tyranny at Ingolstadt University. After being viewed as a threat to the Bavarian elector, Karl Theodore, the society was suppressed in the 1780s; yet ironically, the Illuminati’s actual demise helped fuel the growing myth of its secret influence. In the wake of the French Revolution, two works appeared claiming to have proof of the conspiracy: Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies . . . ​(London, 1797), and Abbé Burruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (London, 1797). For a study of the history and mythology of the Bavarian Illuminati, see Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York, 1918). 9. [Richard Alsop, Theodore Dwight, and Lemuel Hopkins,] The Political Green-​ ­House, For the Year 1798. Addressed to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant, January 1st, 1799 (Hartford, 1799), 5–6. A similar passage appears in Guillotina, For the Year 1799. Addressed to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant (Hartford, 1798): “At length this Negociation hatches, / A set of papers call’d dispatches; / Which op’d in Congress Hall display’d / How upstart despots hearts are made; / How meanness creeps beneath the stride, / Of self conceit and bloated pride; / And shews their plans in ev’ry view, / Fram’d but to cheat, affright, subdue.” 10. [Alsop, Dwight, and Hopkins,] Political Green-​­House, 16. 11. Ibid., 15. 12. Ibid., 16, 8. See also Guillotina, For the Year 1799: “Ye saw two GHOSTS our Anti’s chill, / The Alien and Sedition bill. / They thought the sprites of course would slay ’em, / And join’d their force and wits to lay ’em; / But spite of ev’ry shaft and quill, / They still stalk round, and haunt them still; / And some, ’tis said so dreamt of jail, / The want of bonds, and lack of bail; / Of hand-​­cuffs, ropes, and clanking chains, / As oft to wake with crazy brains.” 13. Stanley Elkins and William McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1789–1800 (New York, 1993), 588. [Robert Treat Paine Jr.,] “Adams and Liberty. The Boston Patriotic Song,” Columbian Centinel, June 9, 1798; “Adams and Washington,” Columbian Centinel, Oct. 27, 1798; “Adams Forever: Or, Pride of October—​­A new Song,” Columbian Centinel, Oct. 9, 1799. Reprints of “Adams and Liberty” include those in the Spectator (New York), June 9, 1798; Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, June 12, 1798; Albany Centinel, June 22, 1798; Eastern Herald & Gazette of Maine (Portland),

Notes to Pages 217–222   317 June 25, 1798; Sun (Dover, N.H.), June 27, 1798; Argus (Putney, Vt.), June 28, 1798; Massachusetts Spy; or the Worcester Gazette, July 4, 1798; Courier (Norwich, Conn.), July 12, 1798; Augusta Chronicle (Ga.), July 14, 1798. See also Adams and Liberty. A New Patriotic Song. Written by Thomas Paine, A.M. (Salem, 1798); Adams and Liberty. The Boston Patriotic Song. Tune—​­“Anacreon in Heaven” (Boston, 1798); Adams and Liberty. A New Patriotic Song. Written by Thomas Paine, A.M. of Boston (Baltimore, 1798). 14. [Paine,] “Adams and Liberty”; [Paine,] “Tune—​­‘He Comes! He Comes! [To Arms, Columbia!],’ ” Columbian Centinel, June 1, 1799. 15. [Paine,] “Adams and Liberty.” 16. Ibid. Other poems symbolically identifying Adams with Washington include “Adams and Washington”; “Adams Forever: Or, Pride of October—​­A new Song”; “Tribute to Washington,” Columbian Centinel, Nov. 7, 1798; [Paine,] “The Green Mountain Farmer; A New Patriotic Song,” United States Chronicle (Providence, R.I., Nov. 30, 1798), rpt. in Mirror (Concord, N.H.), Dec. 24, 1798; Gazette (Portland, Me.), Dec. 24, 1798; Sun (Dover, N.H.), Dec. 24, 1798; Norwich Packet, Jan. 2, 1799; Green Mountain Patriot (Peacham, Vt.), Jan. 11, 1799; Rutland Herald, Jan. 14, 1799; South-​­Carolina State Gazette, and Timothy’s Daily Advertiser (Charleston, S.C.), Jan. 16, 1799; Political Repository: Or, Farmer’s Journal (Brookfield, Mass.), Jan. 22, 1799; Impartial Herald (Suffield, Conn.), Jan 29, 1799. Guillotina, For the Year 1799 and The Political Green-​­House also include passages celebrating Washington’s recommission. 17. [Paine,] “Adams and Liberty.” 18. Ibid. For evidence of public performances of “Adams and Liberty,” see, e.g., an account of a Fourth of July celebration in Portland, Me., in which “The patriotic song of ‘Adams and Liberty’ was sung . . . ​with a spirit and justice to its noble sentiments” (“American Independence,” Gazette (Portland, Me.), July 9, 1798; a commemoration of the anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing, which concluded with the singing of “patriotic songs . . . ​ among which [was] ‘Adams and Liberty’ ” (“Feast of the Shells. Or the Landing of our Forefathers. Celebrated at Boston, December 22, 1798,” Federal Observer [Portsmouth, N.H.], Jan. 3, 1799). Reporting on the song’s popularity in Philadelphia and New York, one writer declared it to be “the popular song of the day, throughout the United States (“Adams and Liberty,” Columbian Centinel, June 20, 1798). 19. [Freneau,] “The American War-​­Hawk,” Time-​­Piece, Sept. 1, 1797. 20. “Jefferson and Liberty. Tune—​­Adams and Liberty,” Constitutional Telegraphe (Boston), Aug. 20, 1800, rpt. in Mirror of the Times (Wilmington, Del.), Sept. 17, 1800; Stewart’s Kentucky Herald (Lexington), Oct. 28, 1800. 21. “Jefferson & Liberty: A Patriotic Song for the Glorious Fourth of March, 1801,” Republican Gazette (Concord, N.H.), Feb. 19, 1801, rpt. in Times and District of Columbia Daily Advertiser (Alexandria, Va.), Feb. 19, 1801; Herald of Liberty (Washington, Pa.), Feb. 23, 1801; American Mercury, Mar. 19, 1801; Impartial Observer (Providence), Mar. 21, 1801. “Condit and Liberty. A New Election Song,” Centinel of Freedom (Newark, N.J.), Oct. 16, 1798; “The Patriot of ’76: or, Smith and Liberty,” Independent Chronicle, Nov. 5, 1798. 22. [John Adams,] By the President of the United States of America, A Proclamation (Philadelphia, 1798); “Psalm for the Federal Fast, To the tune of the 148th Psalm,” Independent Chronicle, Apr. 30, 1798, rpt. in Carey’s United States Recorder (Philadelphia), May 8, 1798; Bee (New London, Conn.), May 16, 1798; Impartial Herald (Newburyport, Mass.), May 16, 1798; Daily Advertiser (New York), May 19, 1798.

318   Notes to Pages 223–227 23. “Psalm for the Federal Fast”; “Prayer, [for the 9th?] Day of May, 1798,” Virginia Herald (Fredericksburg), June 9, 1798. See also “The Political Parson,” which criticizes Federalist clergymen for hypocritically defending their one-​­time enemy, Pope Pius VI, in lamenting Bonaparte’s liberation of Rome (Aurora General Advertiser [Philadelphia], July 27, 1798). 24. “Jacobin’s Psalm, For Fast Day—​­to the tune of Psalm 148th,” Columbian Centinel, May 12, 1798. See also “Psalm for the Federal Fast,” Impartial Herald, May 16, 1798; “Ode Jacobinic,” J. Russell’s Gazette. Commercial and Political, July 11, 1799; Hopkins embeds a “prayer” of the Democrats in Guillotina, For the Year 1799. For a discussion of a similar dynamic during the English Civil War, in which literary or song forms composed by authors on one side of the political and religious divide were appropriated by authors from the opposing side, see Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1985), 31–32. 25. “The Invasion; or, the British War Song,” Anti-​­Jacobin, No. III, Nov. 30, 1797, rpt. in Charles Edmonds, ed., Poetry of the Anti-​­Jacobin (New York, 1890), 25; “Ode to Anarchy. By a Jacobin,” Anti-​­Jacobin, No. IX, Jan. 8, 1798, rpt. in Edmonds, ed., 55; [Robert Southey,] “Scriptural Ode. Fast Day,” Time-​­Piece (New York), June 20, 1798. 26. “The Intended Invasion of England,” Independent Chronicle, Mar. 15, 1798; “Translation of the New Song, of the ‘Army of England,’ ” Porcupine’s Gazette, Apr. 26, 1798. “Song. Tune—​­‘Adams and Liberty,’ ” Columbian Centinel, Feb. 16, 1799. For American reprints of British songs and poems on the failure of Napoleon’s invasion, see, e.g., “Briton’s Unity,” Wiscasset Telegraph (Me.), Sept. 14, 1798; “The Raft. Or, French Arrears Liquidated,” Spooner’s Vermont Journal (Windsor), Sept. 17, 1798, rpt. Newport Mercury, Oct. 9, 1798; New Hampshire Gazette, Oct. 16, 1798; Mirror, Oct. 29, 1798. 27. [William Cobbett,] French Arrogance; or, “The Cat let out of the Bag;” A Political Dialogue Between the Envoys of America, and X.Y.Z. and the Lady (Philadelphia, 1798); Mathew Carey, The Porcupiniad: A Hudibrastic Poem. In Three Cantos. Addressed to William Cobbett. Canto I (Philadelphia, 1799), 15. For other reprints by Cobbett of pro-​­British war poems, see “Song on the Threatened Invasion,” Porcupine’s Gazette, Aug. 17, 1798; “Loyal Song,” Porcupine’s Gazette, Aug. 25, 1798. 28. Elkins and McKitrick, 709–710. 29. “Oration I,” Otsego Herald: or, Western Adverstiser, June 21, 1798; [Alsop, Dwight, and Hopkins,] Political Green-​­House, 4; “Lord save us, the Congress are fighting! A New Song,” Alexandria Advertiser, Mar. 22, 1798; [John Woodward,] The Spunkiad: or Heroism Improved. A Congressional Display of Spit and Cudgel. A Poem, in Four Cantos (Newburgh, N.Y., 1798), 5–6. 30. [Untitled (“Lines upon a late unfortunate . . . ​fracas in Congress”),] Political Repository: Or, Farmer’s Journal (Brookfield, Mass.), Aug. 14, 1798. See also “Of Swords,” Porcupine’s Gazette, Feb. 12, 1798; “Decus—​­In Metre,” Vermont Gazette, Feb. 20, 1798; “Epigram,” Chelsea Courier (Norwich, Conn.), Feb 22, 1798; “On Reading Mr. Lyon’s treatment of Mr. Griswold,” Spooner’s Vermont Journal, Feb. 28, 1798; “A Song, to the tune of the Vicar of Bray, or Yankee Doodle,” Bee, Mar. 21, 1798; “Parnassian Rivulet,” Green Mountain Patriot, Apr. 13, 1798; “Aristocratic Song. Tune—​­‘Yankee Doodle,’ ” Centinel of Freedom, May 29, 1798. 31. [James Carey,] The House of Wisdom in a Bustle; a Poem, Descriptive of the Noted Battle, Lately fought in C‑ng‑‑ss. By Geoffry Touchstone (Philadelphia, 1798), 26; The Battle

Notes to Pages 227–241   319 of the Wooden Sword. Or, the Modern Pugilists. A New Song—​­In 2 Parts ([Philadelphia], [1798?]), 6. 32. William Munford, “The Political Contest, a Dialogue,” Poems, and Compositions in Prose on Several Occasions (Richmond, 1798), 170. 33. Ibid., 167, 175. 34. Humphrey Marshall, The Aliens: a Patriotic Poem . . . ​Occasioned by the Alien Bill, Now Before the Senate, May 15, 1798 (Philadelphia, 1798), 8, 17, 16.

Chapter 7 1. “Principal Occurrences; Or, Signs of the Times. For January—​­1801,” Mercury and the New England Palladium (Boston), Feb. 6, 1801; “Address of the Boy who Carries the American Mercury, to his Customers,” American Mercury (Hartford), Jan. 8, 1801. 2. [Theodore Dwight,] “The Triumph of Democracy,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 5, 1801. 3. “The People’s Friend,” Stewart’s Kentucky Herald (Lexington), Apr. 7, 1801; “Jefferson and Liberty. A patriotic Song for the Glorious 4th March, 1801,” Times; and District of Columbia Daily Advertiser (Alexandria, Va.), Feb. 19, 1801. For additional songs celebrating Jefferson’s election see, e.g., “A Song to Freedom,” Centinel of Freedom (Newark, N.J.), Feb. 3, 1801; “Original Thoughts on the Election of Thomas Jefferson—​­Composed by an Obscure Alien,” Stewart’s Kentucky Herald, Mar. 10, 1801; “On the Election of Thomas Jefferson,” Centinel of Freedom, Mar. 17, 1801. 4. “The People’s Friend.” 5. William C. White, “Patriot Ode,” National Aegis (Worcester), Mar. 9, 1803; “A New ‘Hail Columbia,’ ” American Mercury, Mar. 5, 1801; “The New Year: A Poem, Addressed to the Readers of the American Mercury,” American Mercury, Jan. 8, 1807. 6. “Address, From the Carrier of the Eastern Argus, to its Patrons,” Eastern Argus (Portland, Me.), Jan. 6, 1804. 7. “Symptoms of the Millennium. Addressed to the Readers of the Connecticut Courant,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 4, 1802; Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” in Writings (New York, 1984), 492–493. 8. Jefferson, 493; “Symptoms of the Millennium.” 9. The Minerva, & Mercantile Evening Advertiser, May 2, 1797. For more on how the translations and retranslations of the Mazzei letter, by which Jefferson’s original “boisterous sea of liberty” became a “tempestuous sea,” see Howard R. Marraro, “The Four Versions of Jefferson’s Letter to Mazzei,” William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., 22.1 (1942), 18–29. For poems using the phrase “Mazzei’s Sampson” or “tempestuous sea,” see [Dwight,] “Triumph of Democracy”; “Symptoms of the Millennium”; “Callender’s Complaint, A Parody,” Patriot (Utica, N.Y.), Feb. 28, 1803. 10. An Account of Louisiana, Being an Abstract of Documents in the Offices of the Departments of State and of the Treasury (Philadelphia, 1803), 11–12; [Untitled,] Albany Centinel, Nov. 29, 1803; “Sketches of the Times; Addressed to the Inhabitants of New-​­England, from the Office of the Connecticut Courant,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 4, 1804. 11. “Sketches of the Times.” For more on Jefferson’s interest in mammoth bones and the “mammoth” craze of the 1800s, see Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 2011), 393.

320   Notes to Pages 243–252 12. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings, 264–265; “New Year’s Gift,” Boston Gazette, Jan. 7, 1802. For an example of a poem that references the same passage from the Notes to embarrass Jefferson for his involvement with Sally Hemings, see “A Song Supposed to have been Written by the Sage of Monticello,” Port Folio 2.39 (Oct. 2, 1802), 312. 13. “The Newsboy to the Patrons of the American Mercury,” American Mercury, Jan. 12, 1804. 14. “Catulli, Carm. XLIX. Imitated,” Port Folio 5.5 (Feb. 9, 1805), 40.  15. “The Demon of Democracy,” Port Folio 5.8 (May 18, 1805), 64. 16. “Poetical Justice: Or the New Year’s ‘Message’ of the Carriers of the Palladium to its Patrons,” Mercury and New England Palladium, Jan. 4, 1803. William Dowling argues that the Federalist conception of Democracy as an inexorable historical force arose in part from the belief that what classical republicanism had defined as the demos (or “rabble”) had been reconstituted in the age of Jefferson as “the people” (Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801–1812 [Columbia, S.C., 1999], 1–27); see also Linda Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, N.Y.), 15–20; Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 1–21. 17. [Samuel Ewing,] “Reflections in Solitude. No. II,” Port Folio 1.7 (Feb. 14, 1801), 55; [Ewing,] “Reflections . . . ​No. IV,” Port Folio 1.13 (Mar. 28, 1801), 103; [Ewing,] “Reflections . . . ​No. VII,” Port Folio 1.20 (May 16, 1801), 160. For the Port Folio’s conscious “retreat from history,” see Dowling, 69–88. 18. [Thomas Sergeant,] “Reflections in the City,” Port Folio 5.22 (June 8, 1805), 176. 19. See Foletta, passim, for an account of the founding of the North American Review by second-​­generation Federalist intellectuals who, having grown up amid the party’s decline, compensated for a loss of political influence by engaging in literary and intellectual pursuits; for an analysis of the “lyricization of poetry,” see Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, 2005), 6–10. 20. [Untitled,] National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), Jan. 16, 1807. 21. Joel Barlow, “On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis,” National Intelligencer, Jan. 16, 1807; Barlow, The Columbiad[:] A Poem (Philadelphia, 1807), 357. 22. [John Quincy Adams,] “On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis,” Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review 4.3 (Mar. 1, 1807), 143–144. 23. Ibid. 24. [Thomas Green Fessenden,] Democracy Unveiled; or, Tyranny stripped of the Garb of Patriotism. By Christopher Caustic, L.L.D. (Boston, 1805), v–vi. Fessenden’s time in London was marked by a series of attempts to promote, or obtain patents for, machines whose purported benefits proved in each case to be fraudulent: a hydraulic machine that supposedly pumped water to higher altitudes than were then thought possible, a machine for grinding corn that proved equally inadequate, and Dr. Elisha Perkins’s “metallic tractor,” a medical device described as “one of the most famous quack remedies the western world has known” (Peter Gale Perrin, The Life and Works of Thomas Green Fessenden, 1771–1837 [Orono, Me., 1925], 50). Fessenden used the tractor’s failure and subsequent censure by physicians’ organizations as the occasion for his greatest literary success, a long poem addressed to the London College of Physicians entitled Terrible Tractoration! A Poetical Petition against Galvanizing Trumpery, and the Perkinistic Institution (London, 1803). 25. [Fessenden,] Democracy Unveiled, vi, 17–18.

Notes to Pages 252–265   321 26. Ibid., 64–66, 114. 27. Ibid., 192. 28. [John Williams,] The Hamiltoniad: Or, An Extinguisher for the Royal Faction of New-​­England . . . ​By Anthony Pasquin, Esq. (Boston, 1804), 4, 7, 9, 10–11, 86–87. The Hamiltoniad also stands as a Republican counterpart to Democracy Unveiled in its reliance on an abundance of endnotes, which include lengthy explanations of his charges, counterarguments against opponents’ attacks, and even reprinted letters by Hamilton, Burr, and others as evidence. 29. [Richard Alsop, ed.,] The Echo, With Other Poems ([New York], 1807), iii, vii. 30. Ibid., 166. 31. Thomas Jefferson, “Second Inaugural Address,” in Writings, 520; [Alsop, ed.], Echo, 170, 172. 32. Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address,” 520; [Alsop, ed.], Echo, 174–175. 33. [Alsop, ed.], Echo, 175. For examples of the Federalist motif of the struggle between tradition and innovation, see Kerber, passim; James M. Banner, To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York, 1970), 72–83; Foletta, 1–8. 34. “The Echo, with other Poems, 1807,” Monthly Register, Magazine, and Review of the United States 2 (Mar. 1, 1807), 244. 35. “Notice,” Salmagundi; or, the Whim-​­Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others, Feb. 24, 1807, 81–82. In his introductory remarks to a reprint in the Port Folio of one of Washington Irving’s comic essays from Salmagundi, Dennie states: “The writer . . . ​is a well principled Federalist, a wit, and a cavalier” (Port Folio 3.20 [May 16, 1807], 307). For additional examples of Dennie’s sense of literary kinship with Irving and the Salmagundi group, see Dowling, Literary Federalism, 67, 86. 36. [Thomas Green Fessenden,] “New Literary Publication,” Weekly Inspector (New York), Feb. 7, 1807. 37. “FLUMMERY. From the Mill (1) of Pindar Cockloft, Esq. Being a Poem with Notes, or rather Notes with a Poem, (2) in the manner of Doctor (3) Christopher Costive,” Salmagundi, Feb. 24, 1807, 70, 71, 74. 38. Philip Lampi, “The Federalist Party Resurgence, 1808–1816: Evidence from the New Nation Votes Database,” Journal of the Early Republic 33.2 (2013), 256. 39. Gordon Wood has described the embargo as “perhaps the greatest example in American history of ideology brought to bear on a matter of public policy” (Empire of Liberty, 609; see also 647–658). For more on the embargo’s effects and the resistance movement against it, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels & Indian Allies (New York, 2010), 115–119; Banner, 294–306. 40. Barlow, Columbiad, 360; “Yankee Doodle,” New-​­England Palladium, Mar. 11, 1808. 41. Henry Mellen, “The Embargo. A Song Composed by Henry Mellen, Esq. of Dover, and Sung at the Celebration of the 4th July,” Columbian Centinel, July 13, 1808. 42. “A New Song—​­By Dibdin, jun. Sung by Tom Loveall, an American Tar,” Portland Gazette, and Maine Advertizer, Mar. 14, 1808; in a later reprint, the singer’s name is changed to “Tom Dreadnought, a True American Tar,” presumably to heighten his virtuousness (Tickler [Philadelphia], Nov. 23, 1808). 43. “Embargo—​­A New Song,” Political Observatory (Walpole, N.H.), Aug. 1, 1808. 44. “Parody,” Political Observatory (Walpole, N.H.), Aug. 22, 1808.

322   Notes to Pages 266–271 45. “Song Of spunky Jonathan, who, from the walls of Lexington road fired away all his ammunition, and then threw stones!” Democrat (Boston), June 1, 1808. 46. “Anniversary Ode of the Columbian Reading Society. February 18th, 1808,” Washington Expositor, Apr. 2, 1808; “A New Song—​­Tune, Yankee Doodle,” New-​­York Commercial Advertiser, Mar. 30, 1808; “Sister Tabitha’s Song, Continued,” New-​­York Commercial Advertiser, Apr. 4, 1808. For other versions of the Yankee Doodle motif, see “A Song—​­Composed by a Sailor,” New-​­York Evening Post, Oct. 29, 1808. For the argument that the embargo allowed loopholes for French trade, see “Embargo—​­A New Song,” Political Observatory, Aug. 1, 1808. 47. “Hetty’s Hymn, Or an Ode to Embargo. Tune, the Old Spinning Wheel,” True American (Trenton, N.J.), Sept. 7, 1807. 48. “A Song, Composed by T.P. deceased. To the Tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Democratic Press (Philadelphia), Apr. 6, 1810. Another example of this argument is found in “Peace and Madison,” which celebrates the president’s commitment to keep the peace—​ ­“Then shout huzza, huzza, huzza for Peace and Madison”—​­but does so in the context of a broader panegyric to his having “humbled” the “British lion” (Independent Chronicle [Boston], July 3, 1809). 49. “The American Star,” Public Advertiser (New York), Oct. 2, 1810; another poem quotes one of the heroes of the battle of Bennington, General John Stark, in an 1809 message to fellow soldiers strongly supporting a second war against Britain, in which he coined the phrase that would become the motto of his home state of New Hampshire: “STARK commands, ‘Live free or die’ / Virtue dictates—​­we comply—​­/ ‘Death is not of ills the worst’ / SLAVERY is a state more curst” (“General Stark’s Volunteer,” Columbian Gazette [Utica, N.Y.], Oct. 10, 1809). 50. James Price, “Song, Written for the Fourth of July, 1809,” Sun (Pittsfield, Mass.), Aug. 5, 1809; Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia, 2012), xiii; William Ray, “War,” Public Advertiser (New York), Jan. 21, 1813. The latter poem was originally published in 1807 with the title “War, or a Prospect of it, From recent instances of British Outrage” (Albany Register, July 24, 1807); as the title suggests, it was a response to the British seizure of the U.S.S. Chesapeake in 1807, the event that led to the passage of the Embargo Act. 51. “Ode to War,” Providence Gazette, Nov. 28, 1807. 52. “The following excellent passage on War, is from the pen of Miss Hannah More,” Connecticut Herald, July 11, 1809, rpt. Providence Gazette, July 29, 1809; Spooner’s Vermont Journal (Windsor), Oct. 2, 1809. For more on the participation of American Federalists in the international peace movement, see Merle Eugene Curti, The American Peace Crusade, 1815–1860 (Durham, N.C., 1927). 53. “To the Advocates of War,” Sun, Sept. 2, 1809, rpt. Essex Register (Salem), Sept. 23, 1809; Weekly Wanderer (Randolph, Vt.), Sept. 29, 1809; Spooner’s Vermont Journal, Oct. 30, 1809. 54. “Columbia Victorious. Tune—​­‘To Anacreon in Heaven,’ ” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), Dec. 15, 1812; “Horrida Bella!” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Dec. 18, 1812. Other examples of antiwar verse published during the War of 1812 include “The Field of Battle,” Spooner’s Vermont Journal, Mar. 29, 1813; “The Miseries of War,” Delaware Gazette and Peninsula Advertiser (Wilmington), Dec. 8, 1814. 55. “Address of the Carrier of the Boston Weekly Messenger, to his Highly Respected Friends and Patrons,” Weekly Messenger, Jan. 8, 1813. See also “To Col. Cass, and all the

Notes to Pages 271–276   323 friends of peace,” Centinel of Freedom (Newark, N.J.), Oct. 20, 1812; “The Carrier of ‘The American’ to his Patrons,” Northern Whig (Hudson, N.Y.), Jan. 1, 1813. For more doleful accounts of the surrender of Detroit, see, e.g., “Hull’s Surrender, or Villainy Somewhere,” True American (Bedford, Pa.), Nov. 10, 1813; “New-​­year’s Address by the Carrier of Kline’s Weekly Carlisle Gazette to his Patrons,” Kline’s Weekly Carlisle Gazette, Jan. 8, 1813. 56. “The Carrier’s Wish: respectfully dedicated to those he loves best—​­the generous patrons of the Columbian Centinel. January 1, 1813 (Boston, 1812). See also “News-​ ­Carrier’s Address to the Patron’s of the Intelligencer, Merrimack Intelligencer (Haverhill, Mass.), Jan. 2, 1813; “From the United States Gazette,” General Repertory Advertiser (Boston), Jan. 5, 1813; “The New Year,” Berkshire Reporter (Pittsfield, Mass.), Jan. 7, 1813; “The New Year,” Concord Gazette (N.H.), Jan. 26, 1813. 57. See Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. National Building, 1770–1870 (New York, 2007), for a corrective against the tendency to view the early republic as a unified “imagined community” as theorized by Benedict Anderson and others. For more on how Federalist protests of the war were viewed as bordering on sedition, see Wood, Empire of Liberty, 692–693; Taylor, 175–182, 335–339, 414–417. 58. The Battle of Lake Erie (n.p., [1813?]); “The New Year’s Address of the Carriers of the American Mercury, to his Patrons,” American Mercury, Jan. 6, 1813. For ballads celebrating Perry’s victory, see, e.g., “Lines by a Young Lady of Philadelphia on the evening of the illumination of that city in honor of the victory obtained by Commodore Perry on Lake Erie,” Democratic Press (Philadelphia), Sept. 30, 1813; “The Battle of Erie. Tune—​ ­Humors of Glen,” Voice of the Nation (Philadelphia), Oct. 5, 1813; “Battle of the Lake,” Universal Gazette (Washington, D.C.), Oct. 8, 1813; “Song Tune—​­St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning,” Virginia Argus, Oct. 11, 1813; “Spirit of Lake Erie: Or, the First Vision of Kickapoo,” New-​­Jersey Journal, Oct. 12, 1813; “On the late Victory at Lake Erie,” Portland Gazette, and Maine Advertiser, Oct. 18, 1813; “A New Song, On Commodore Perry’s Victory. Tune—​­Arethusa,” Centinel of Freedom, Feb. 1, 1814; “The Hero of Lake Erie,” Boston Patriot, Feb. 9, 1814; John Pierpont, “Second Ode, Sung at the Dinner lately give at Boston, in honor of Commodore Perry,” Connecticut Herald, May 13, 1814. 59. New Year’s address to the Patrons of the Yankee (Boston, 1815). 60. A Year of jubilee: The carriers of the Columbian Centinel, with the kindest wishes of the day, congratulate their patrons—​­on the restoration of peace to the whole world:—­the revival of commerce, and the mechanic arts:—­the return of good times to industry and enterprise out of office; and the general enjoyment of health and prosperity;—­and take leave, respectfully to dedicate to them the following hastily written lines (Boston, 1815). 61. “Ode for the New Year,” Northern Whig (Hudson, N.Y.), Jan. 9, 1816; “The Times: Addressed by the Carriers of the Albany Daily Advertiser, to its Patrons,” Albany Advertiser, Jan. 4, 1817; “Address of the Carriers of the Salem Gazette, to its Patrons, To whom they wish a Happy New Year,” Salem Gazette, Jan. 1, 1818; “Address of the Carrier of the Federalist,” Village Record, or Chester and Delaware Federalist (West Chester, Pa.), Jan. 7 1818. The phrase “Era of Good Feelings” first appeared as the heading for a story recounting a dinner in honor of President Monroe hosted by John and Abigail Adams, which noted that recently “many persons have met at festive boards, in pleasant converse, whom party politics had long severed” (“Era of Good Feeling,” Columbian Centinel, July 12, 1817). For more on the accuracy of the term to describe the postwar period, see Sandy Moats, “The Limits of Good Feelings: Partisan Healing and Political Futures during James Monroe’s Boston Visit of 1817,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 118 (2008), 155–191.

324   Notes to Pages 277–283 62. “The Star-​­Spangled Banner. Tune—​­Anacreon in Heaven,” War (New York), Sept. 6, 1814; “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” Federal Republican (Washington, D.C.), Sept. 22, 1814; Alexandria Gazette, Sept. 27, 1814; Petersburg Intelligencer, Sept. 30, 1814; Independent Chronicle, Oct. 3, 1814; Cabinet (Schenectady, N.Y.), Oct. 12, 1814; Gleaner ­(Wilkes-​ ­Barre, Pa.), Oct. 14, 1814; Middlesex Gazette (Middletown, Conn.), Oct. 20, 1814; Washingtonian (Windsor, Vt.), Nov. 14, 1814.

Epilogue 1. “New Year’s Address, of the Carrier of the American Mercury,” American Mercury, Jan. 11, 1825; “New Year’s Address of the Carrier of the Gazette,” New-​­London Gazette, Jan. 4, 1832. For New Year’s verses that avoided political conflict altogether or criticized excessive partisanship, see, e.g., “An Address of the Carrier of the Connecticut Courant, To his Patrons,” Connecticut Courant, Jan. 6, 1824; “Address of the Carrier of the Jamestown Journal to his Patrons,” Jamestown Journal (N.Y.), Jan. 3, 1827; “Address Of the Carrier of the Watch-​­Tower, to his patrons, Jan. 1, 1827,” Watch-​­Tower (Cooperstown, N.Y.), Jan. 8, 1827. Other variations on nonpartisan New Year’s verses include “Address of the Carrier of The Examiner, to his Patrons. January 1, 1827,” Washington Review and Examiner (Pa.), Jan. 6, 1827, which declares a preference for Jackson but a willingness to accept whoever is elected. Some newspapers praised both parties equally, such as the New-​­York Evening Post, which complimented Adams during his administration for “govern[ing] sagely” (“New Year’s Address of the Carriers of the Evening Post to their Patrons,” New-​­York Evening Post, Jan. 3, 1827), and then praised Jackson as “the People’s man” on the occasion of his being elected (“The New-​­Year’s Address of the Carriers of the Evening Post, to their Patrons,” New-​­York Evening Post, Jan. 2, 1829). For an example of a carrier’s address that retained the partisan rhetoric of earlier decades, see “Address of the Carrier of ‘The Times,’ to his Patrons,” Times, and Hartford Advertiser, Jan. 6, 1824. 2. “Jackson and Liberty,” Saratoga Sentinel, Oct. 21, 1828; “Harrison and Liberty,” Log Cabin (New York), Oct. 5, 1840; “Lincoln and Liberty,” Atlantic Journal (May’s Landing, N.J.), June 15, 1860; Polk was honored in a chorus added to a rendition of “Jefferson and Liberty” (Hartford Times, Nov. 23, 1844). 3. [William Cullen Bryant,] The Embargo, or Sketches of the Times; a Satire. By a Youth of Thirteen (Boston, 1808); Parke Godwin, A Biography of W. C. Bryant, with Extracts from His Private Correspondence. In Two Volumes (New York, 1883), vol. 1, 75. 4. “Slavery,” Village Record, or Chester and Delaware Federalist, July 8, 1818; Address of the Carrier to the Patrons of the Connecticut Journal, Jan. 1, 1818 (New Haven, 1817). For examples of antislavery verse in the Port Folio, see, e.g. “The Slave,” Port Folio 1.15 (Apr. 11, 1801), 118–119; “Address to an Oppressor of the Enslaved Africans,” Port Folio 4.1 (Jan. 7, 1804), 8; J. E. Stock, “Lines suggested by the Presentation of Colours, on Monday the 7th of May, 1804, to the Bristol Volunteer Cavalry,” Port Folio 5.5 (Feb. 9, 1805), 39; “An Heroic Epistle from JAQUES I, Emperor of Hayti,” Port Folio 5.8 (Mar. 2, 1805), 63; [Untitled (“God Wills us Free”),] Port Folio 1.10 (Mar. 15, 1806), 154; “To England, on the Slave Trade,” Port Folio 2.51 (Dec. 27, 1806), 400; [Untitled (“When Avarice Enslaves the Mind,”)] Port Folio 3.21 (May 23, 1807), 336. 5. “Slavery,” Columbian Centinel, Aug. 26, 1820; “Thoughts on Martial Poetry,” Friend of Peace 4.5 (Jan. 5, 1827), 157.

Notes to Pages 284–285   325 6. “The Cherokee,” Philadelphia National Enquirer, Jan. 14, 1837; John Greenleaf Whittier, “Stanzas for the Times,” in The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 3 (Boston, 1892), 36. 7. [James Russell Lowell,] “Yankee’s Notion about Enlisting in the Mexican War,” Liberator, July 3, 1846; “Union,” Liberator, Mar. 11, 1837.

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Index

h

abolitionists, 156–­58, 159–­60, 162, 310n.35, 311nn.46, 47 activism/protests: abolitionists, 156–­60, 162, 310n.35, 311nn.46–­47; Embargo Act and, 261–­62; international peace movement, 269–­70; Jay Treaty and, 191, 193–­94, 203–­4; poetry of protest, 282–­85; Stamp Act and, 23, 35–­36, 37, 294n.24; Townshend Act protests, 23, 39, 52; during War of 1812, 274 Adams, John: as aristocrat, 15, 148, 166–­68, 184; conspiracy and, 124, 126; John Fenno and, 180; in M’Fingal, 87; Odell and, 106; in “Stanzas on the arrival of Congress in Philadelphia,” 170. See also Adams, John, presidency of Adams, John, presidency of, 206–­31; “Adams and Liberty,” 217–­21; Alien and Sedition Acts, 216–­17, 221, 228–­29, 230, 236; federal fast day, 222; Lyon-­Griswold affair, 225–­29; quasi-­war of 1798, 150, 156, 206–­7, 217–­21. See also Alien and Sedition Acts; Lyon-­Griswold affair; quasi-­war of 1798; XYZ dispatches Adams, John Quincy, 249–­50 Adams, Samuel, 96, 103, 107 “Adams and Liberty” (Paine), 217–­21, 317n.18 “Adam’s Fall: The Trip to Cambridge,” 80 Adet, Pierre, 206 Administration of Justice Act, 19 affective language: and moral/political transgression, 149; sublimity, 142–­43, 146; versification and, 178. See also sentimentalism

African Americans: exclusion of, from public sphere, 10; Jefferson’s views on, 161–­63, 241–­43; racial equality and, 158–­61; support for Revolutionary War by, 110–­11 Algiers, 193 Alien and Sedition Acts: Federalist support for, 215–­17; Republican opposition to, 221, 228–­30, 236 alienation, 235, 246–­47, 271 Aliens: A Patriotic Poem (Marshall), 227, 229–­30 Alsop, Richard: “Echo, The,” creation of, by, 141, 142; “Echo, The,” valedictory installment of, by, 234, 254–­58; on Jay Treaty, 192, 195–­96; on Jefferson’s second inaugural speech, 254–­58; New Year’s carrier’s addresses of, 213; as prolific, 308n.18. See also “Echo, The” “American Antiquities”: and other satirical writing by Connecticut Wits, 120–­24; structure of, 114–­16, 119–­20, 160, 305n.30, 305n.32, 306n.34. See also “Anarchiad, The” American Mercury: on election of 1800, 232–­34; on French Revolution, 134; on Miami Wars, 155–­56; on racial equality, 158–­59. See also “Echo, The” American Minerva, 240 American Philosophical Society, 241 American Revolution, 8–­9; French Revolution and, 128–­29, 209; language of, 128–­29; meaning of, 209; memory of, 218, 265–­66; veterans of, 170–­75, 178–­79 American Revolution, songs and poems of, 73–­83; “Battle of the Kegs,” 76–­78;

328   Index American Revolution (cont.) “Cow-­Chace,” 78–­79; “King’s Own Regulars,” 75; pro-­British, 103; “Yankee Doodle,” 80–­83, 299n.31, 300nn.32–­33 “American Soldier” (Freneau), 171–­72 “Americans to Arms” (1775 broadside), 74 “American Times, The” (Odell), 105–­8 “American War Hawk” (Freneau), 220 “America Triumphant; or Old England’s Downfall” (song), 45 “Anacreon in Heaven,” 220 “Anarchiad, The: A Poem, on the restoration of Chaos and substantial Night, in twenty-­four books” (Connecticut Wits), 113–­24; “American Antiquities” frame narrative, 114–­16, 119–­24, 305n.30, 305n.32, 306n.34; constitutional convention and, 116–­17, 119–­20, 306n.34; Dunciad allusions, 113–­14, 305n.29; and other satirical writing by Connecticut Wits, 120–­24, 306n.43; publication and reprinting, 113; Rhode Island paper currency and, 112, 114, 115, 117–­18; Rolliad and, 181; Shays’ rebellion and, 115–­17, 119, 306n.38; “William Wimble Letters” and, 121–­22. See also Connecticut Wits; conspiracy discourse André, John, 78–­79, 108 Anti-­Federalists, 112, 115–­16, 117, 122, 168. See also Federalists Anti-­Jacobin (magazine), 144 anti-­speculation poetry, 171–­75; “American Soldier” (Freneau), 171–­72; Glass, The, 173–­74; in “Probationary Odes,” 182–­85 Antoinette, Marie, 134 Argus, 157 aristocracy: abolishment of, in France, 131; Aristocracy: An Epic Poem (Alsop), 192, 196–­200; British identity and, 83; vs. common people, 237; Federalists as, 119, 148, 179; natural, 167; vs. republicanism, 173; slaveowners as, 163–­64; as unjust, 129. See also conspiracy discourse Aristocracy: An Epic Poem (Alsop), 192, 196–­200 Arnold, Benedict, 108–­9 Association, &c. of the Delegates of the Colonies, at the Grand Congress, Held at Philadelphia, Sept. 1, 1774, Versified, and adapted to Music, The (Bob Jingle), 66–­67, 298n.13 Augustan satire: “American Times,” 105–­8; false consciousness and, 195; form of, 278;

influence of, on American political poetry, 70, 278, 282; by Odell, 68–­75; Stamp Act and, 39–­45, 69; Stamp Act protest symbolism and, 294n.24; voice of community in, 299n.16 Aurora General Advertiser, 138, 196–­97, 200, 206 Austria, 207, 209 A Year of jubilee, 275 Bache, Benjamin, 196, 201, 203 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 89, 301n.42 Baltimore, 273 Bank bill, 172 Bank of the United States, 170, 185 Banneker, Benjamin, 161, 162 Barlow, Joel, 111, 164–­65, 248–­50; “Anarchiad, The,” 113; Columbiad, 84, 248, 249, 262; Conspiracy of Kings, 125–­26, 132, 136–­37, 248; conspiratorial logic of, 216; “Guillotine, The,” 138–­39, 308n.16; Vision of Columbus, 111, 124–­25, 307n.45 Batavian Republic, 139 Battle of Bunker Hill, 29, 32 Battle of Lake Erie, 273 Battle of Saratoga. See Burgoyne, John, proclamation before Battle of Saratoga “Battle of the Kegs” (Hopkinson), 76–­78, 299n.26 Battle of the Wooden Sword, 227 Battle of Wildcat Creek, 271–­72 Bavarian Illuminati, 96, 205, 301n.1, 316n.8; Alien and Sedition Acts as response to, 216–­17; clergy and, 222; French Revolution and, 94, 214–­16; in retrospective poetry, 250–­53; XYZ affair and, 214–­15 Baviad (Gifford), 144 Belcher, Jonathan, 27 “Benevolence, Jr.” and “Benevolence, Sr.” letters (Connecticut Wits), 114, 122, 123 Bernard, Francis, 46 Biglow Papers (Lowell), 284 Bishop, Abraham, 145–­46, 157 Blanchard, James, 175, 178 Bob Jingle (pseudonym), 66, 298n.13 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 199, 207; as authoritarian, 211; Britain, planned invasion of, by, 223–­24; as champion of liberty, 209–­10; as tyrannical, 213 Boston Committee of Correspondence, 23 Boston Evening-­Post, 35 Boston Gazette, 37, 49–­50, 87

Index   329 Boston Tea Party, 19 Boyce, William, 47 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 152–­54 Britain: American colonists, perception of, by, 45, 48–­50; antislavery movement in, 310n.35; as corrupt, 129, 184; Federalists as loyal to, 265, 273–­74; France and, 191, 209, 223–­25; literary independence from, 4; quasi-­war of 1798 and, 206, 208–­9; satirical literature of, 181–­82; sentimentalism in, 144. See also American Revolution; Embargo Act of 1807; Jay Treaty; Stamp Act crisis “British Grenadiers, The,” 74–­75 “Britons to Arms,” 74 Brooks, Cleanth, 4 Brothers, Richard, 213 Brown, John, 41, 105 Brown, William Wells, 164 Bryant, William Cullen, 281–­82 Burgoyne, John: as Gage’s ghostwriter, 28–­29; Native Americans and, 59, 61, 297n.5; poetry of conspiracy and, 95, 103; in Voyage to Boston, 100 Burgoyne, John, proclamation before Battle of Saratoga, 33, 56–­65; full title, 58; reactions inspired by, 59–­64; reprinting of, 63–­64 Burke, Edmund, 132 Burr, Aaron, 196, 198–­99, 232, 253 Bute, Earl of, 40, 42, 86, 95, 103 Butler, Samuel, 85–­86 By His Excellency, the Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq. (Gage), 21–­22 Callender, James, 242 Canada, 261–­62 “Captive King” (Wolcot), 134 “Captive Queen” (Morton), 134 Carey, James, 227 Carey, Matthew, 225 carrier’s addresses, 11–­12; against antiwar Federalists, 273–­74; decline of, 280; about election of 1800, 232–­34; about French Revolution, 213; Stamp Act, opposition to, in, 35–­38; “Symptoms of the Millennium, in the Year 1801,” 238–­40; traditional format of, 34–­35, 293n.19; after War of 1812, 275, 276 Catholicism, 209–­10 Christianity. See religion Church, Benjamin, 39, 42, 43, 70, 105 Church, Edward, 166–­68

Churchill, Charles, 39, 40, 42–­43, 68, 70, 295n.30 Clark, William, 241, 248, 249 Clinton, George, 120, 148 Cobbett, William, 224–­25 Coercive Acts (Intolerable Acts), 19, 28, 66 Cogswell, Mason Fitch, 178 Columbia River, 249–­50 Columbiad (Barlow), 84, 248, 249, 262 Columbian Centinel, 134, 275–­76 Commissioners of Customs Act, 45–­46 Committee of Public Safety, 136 Common Sense (Paine), 72 Connecticut Courant: antispeculation campaign, response to, in, 178–­79; Democratiad, The, 5–­7, 192, 201–­5; on election of 1800, 233; on French Revolution, 137; Jefferson’s inaugural address, parody of, in, 238–­40; on Miami Wars, 154; motivations for satires in, 123; New Proclamation, A!, 3, 29–­30, 84–­85; on St. Domingue slave revolt, 157; Williams letter in, 120–­21. See also Democratiad, The; “Echo, The” Connecticut Journal, 122 Connecticut Wits, 13; “Benevolence, Jr.” and “Benevolence, Sr.” letters, 114, 122, 123; carrier’s addresses by, 36; conspiratorial logic of, 110, 215–­17; Timothy Dwight, 111, 210, 222, 233; Federalist discourse and, 118–­20; France, criticism of, by, 207–­8; David Humphreys, 111, 113, 120; members of, 13, 111, 125; Elihu Hubbard Smith, 141, 193; “William Wimble Letters,” 114, 120–­22, 305n.31. See also Alsop, Richard; “Anarchiad, The”; Barlow, Joel; “Echo, The”; Hopkins, Lemuel; mock epic; Trumbull, John Conquest of Canaan, The (Dwight), 111 Conscience Whigs, 164 conspiracy discourse, 14–­15, 95–­126, 291n.18; anti-­Arnold, 108–­9; anti-­Gage, 98–­102; decline of, 259–­60; Democratiad as response to, 203–­5; of Democratic-­Republican societies, 186, 192, 195, 196, 200, 202, 203, 215–­17; effects and affirmations of, 98; French Revolution and, 148; ideology and, 302n.2; Loyalist, 102–­4, 105–­8; about Loyalists, 104–­5; quasi-­war of 1798 and, 219–­20, 225, 228; in satiric unmasking of Jefferson, 239–­40; speculators and, 174, 177–­79; Wheatley and, 110–­11. See also “Anarchiad, The”; Bavarian Illuminati

330   Index Conspiracy of Kings (Barlow), 125–­26, 132, 137, 248 constructionism, 185 Continental Army, 56 Cooper, Myles, 102, 103–­4 Cornwallis, Charles, 92–­93, 301n.49 counterproclamations. See proclamations; versification “Cow-­Chace, The” (André), 78–­79, 80, 108 currency circulation, 112, 114, 115, 117–­18, 304nn.26, 27 Daily Advertiser, 149, 180 Dangerous Vice --------- (Church), 166–­68 Daughters of Liberty, 51 Deane, Silas, 29 de Buffon, compte, 241 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 127 Declaration of Independence, 56, 57; issuing of, 68; Loyalist response to, 68–­75 Declaration of Independence (Richards), 127–­29 Decree of the Sun, 135–­36 Della Cruscans, 144 democracy: Democracy: An Epic Poem, 193–­96; Democracy Unveiled, 250–­54; as despotism, 194, 199; Jefferson’s presidency and, 235, 244–­49, 252, 320n.16; language of liberty/ equality/rights and, 147; as mob rule, 244, 252; violent rhetoric and, 140. See also Democratic-­Republican societies; Republicans Democracy: An Epic Poem (Smith), 193–­96 Democracy Unveiled; or, Tyranny stripped of the Garb of Patriotism (Fessenden), 250–­54, 321n.28 Democratiad, The: A Poem, in Retaliation, for the “Philadelphia Jockey Club.” By a Gentleman of Connecticut (Hopkins), 5–­7, 192, 201–­5 Democratic-­Republican societies: Bavarian Illuminati conspiracy and, 251–­52; formation of, 137–­38, 169, 185–­86; Jay Treaty and, 193–­96; as paranoid/ conspiratorial, 189, 192, 195, 196, 202, 203, 215–­17; “Probationary Odes” and, 181; racial equality and, 160–­61; violent rhetoric of, 140 Dennie, Joseph, 188, 245, 258–­59 “Description of a City Shower” (Swift), 79 diabolical imagery. See Satanic imagery “Dialogue between Satan and Arnold,” 108

Diary, 149 Dickinson, John, 46–­49, 50 Directory, 207, 208–­9, 213–­15 Discourses on Davila (Adams), 180 D’Israeli, Isaac, 26 distant reading, 7, 288n.7 Douglass, Frederick, 284 Draper, Richard, 85, 87 Draper, Samuel, 31 Dryden, John, 97, 100 Duer, William, 174 Dunciad, The (Pope): allusions in “The Anarchiad,” 113–­14, 305n.29; influence of, 5; narrative structure of, 160; Peter Pindar character and, 183; poetry of conspiracy and, 100; Shaftesbury, satire of, in, 144 Dunciad Variorum (Pope), 195 Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, 61–­62, 76 Dwight, Theodore, 141, 213, 215, 233, 234 Dwight, Timothy, 111, 210, 222, 233 East India Company tea, 52 “Echo, The,” 141–­54, 308n.18; anti-­speculation rhetoric, satire of, in, 176–­78; criticism of, 150–­51, 188; Democratiad, 5, 7, 192, 201–­5; Henrico letter, satire of, in, 148–­50; on Jefferson’s second inaugural speech, 254–­58; language of liberty/equality/rights, satire of, in, 144–­48; Native Americans, defense of, in, 153–­56, 254–­56; vs. Political Green House, 215–­16; retrospective publication of, 234, 250, 254; sentimentalism, satire of, in, 142–­44, 149, 255; slave revolts, support for, by, 156–­58 economics: banking, 170, 172, 185, 290n.17; colonial vs. Native American, 255–­56; currency circulation, 112, 114, 115, 117–­18, 304nn.26–­27; public sphere, participation in, and, 10; stock exchange, 173; U.S. Treasury, 170, 171, 175. See also speculators; taxes; trade Edes, Benjamin, 49, 72 effigy, 37, 42, 294n.24 electors, 148 elegiac verse, 108, 245–­48, 261 Embargo Act of 1807, 156, 235, 260–­68, 321n.39; background to, 260–­62; as form of warfare, 266–­68; patriotism and, 265–­68; republican values and, 264–­65; songs about, 262–­68. See also embargo songs “Embargo—A song,” 263–­64

Index   331 Embargo, or Sketches of the Times (Bryant), 281–­82 embargo songs/poetry, 262–­68; anti-­embargo songs/poetry, 263–­64, 281–­82; form/ popularity of, 262–­64; pro-­embargo songs, 264–­68 emotional affect. See affective language Enlightenment: American Revolution and, 128–­29; Bavarian Illuminati conspiracy and, 96; counterenlightenment, 256; as ideological, 256; Republicans as party of, 236; science, 137, 241–­43. See also language of liberty/equality/rights; progressivism epic, 100, 115–­16. See also mock epic equality, 158–­61, 164. See also language of liberty/equality/rights Era of Good Feelings, 276–­77, 279, 323n.61 Erskine, William, 76, 77 Essay on Satire (Brown), 41 Everett, David, 189 Ewing, Samuel, 246 “Extract from The Retrospect” (Dwight), 210–­13, 315n.4 Faction, a Sketch; or a Summary of the Causes of the present most unnatural and indefensible of all Rebellion’s; the very first excepted (Hunt), 102, 303n.12 Fall of Lucifer, an Elegiac Poem on the Infamous Defection of the Late General Arnold, The, 108 Farewell, The (Churchill), 42 Farmer’s Weekly Museum, 188–­90, 225 fast-­day psalms, 221–­24 “Fate of John Burgoyne, The,” 59 Federalist poetry: about Alien and Sedition Acts, 215, 216–­17; antiwar poetry, 268–­73; on French Revolution, 134, 136–­37, 148–­50, 207–­8; about Lyon-­Griswold affair, 225–­26; as paranoid/conspiratorial, 215–­17, 219–­20, 251–­53; patriotic war hymns, 217–­20; retreat of, from politics, 245–­48, 258–­61. See also “Anarchiad, The”; Connecticut Wits; mock epic; retrospective literary warfare; satiric unmasking of Jefferson Federalists: Alien and Sedition acts, support for, by, 215–­17; as aristocratic/elitist, 119, 124, 148, 179, 204; decline of, 17–­18, 230–­32, 243–­44, 249, 260–­61, 275–­77; as disloyal, 235, 265, 272–­74; French Revolution, response to, by, 130, 140, 149–­50, 207–­8; naming of, 15, 112; quasi-­war of 1798, support for, by, 206–­7; racial views of, 159–­65,

311nn.46–­47; resurgence of, during Madison’s presidency, 18, 235, 261, 272–­73, 276–­77; self-­image of, 15, 179, 309n.25. See also Adams, John, presidency of; Anti-­Federalists; Bavarian Illuminati; Federalist poetry Federal Orrery, 160 “Fellow Laborer,” 175–­79, 312n.13 Female Patriot, No. 1, The (anonymous broadside), 52–­53 “Female Patriots, The” (Griffits), 50–­51, 52 Fenno, John, 180 Fessenden, Thomas Green, 189, 250–­54, 259–­60, 320n.24 “Fidelia” (Griffits), 52 “Flummery” (Irving), 259–­60 Fourth of July, 128 France: American Revolution, support for, by, 58; Britain and, 191, 209, 223–­25; Embargo Act as benefit to, 266; political destiny of, 207. See also French Revolution; quasi-­war of 1798 Franco-­British war, 209 Franklin, Benjamin, 72, 75, 290n.13 Franklin, James, 11, 290n.13 Franklin, William, 57 French Arrogance; or, “The Cat let out of the Bag” (Cobbett), 224–­25 French National Assembly, 130–­31 French National Convention, 129, 137 French Revolution, 14, 127–­41; American criticism of, 134, 136–­37, 148–­49, 221–­22; American support for, 130–­41, 237; Barlow and, 125, 126; Bavarian Illuminati and, 94, 214–­16; Directory, 207, 208–­9, 213, 214–­15; as divinely inspired, 135; Napoleon and, 199; radicalism of, 252; secularism of, 211–­12; Terror, 136–­41, 177–­78, 213, 308n.12. See also Jacobins; language of liberty/equality/rights Freneau, Philip, 14; anti-­Gage versification by, 20, 29, 32, 98–­102, 106–­8, 302n.5; anti-­speculation poetry by, 171–­72, 174–­75; criticism of, by Hamilton, 313n.20; criticism of “Echo” poets by, 150; election of 1800 and, 234; French Revolution and, 131–­34, 138–­40, 209; Jay Treaty and, 190, 201; on Loyalists, 104–­5; on Napoleon, 209–­10; National Gazette, founding of, by, 14, 180–­81; Odell and, 106, 109; poetry of conspiracy and, 95, 98–­102, 104–­7, 109, 216; quasi-­war, opposition to, by, 220; retrospective work of, 250; Tucker and, 188

332   Index Gage, Thomas, 19–­34; dismissal of, 55, 57; M’Fingal and, 88; poetry of conspiracy and, 95, 103; power of, 32. See also versification, anti-­Gage Gage, Thomas, proclamations by, 19, 20–­22, 292nn.4, 5; Burgoyne as ghostwriter, 28–­29; evidence they were ignored, 32; immediate responses, 23, 24, 27; against vice and profaneness, 23–­24. See also versification, anti-­Gage Gardiner, John Sylvester John, 160–­61 Gazette of the United States, 134, 180 General Court of Massachusetts Bay, 57 General Gage’s Confession (Freneau), 99 General Gage’s Soliloquy (Freneau), 99 Genêt, Edmond-­Charles, 138, 149, 199 George III, 1, 23–­24 Gifford, William, 144, 223 Giles, William Branch, 175 Gill, John, 49 Glass, The, 173–­74 “God Save the King” (Stansbury), 93 Godwin, William, 132, 237, 257 Grateful Reflections On the Divine Goodness vouchsaf ’d to the American Arms in their remarkable successes in the Northern Department, after the giving up of our Fortresses at Ticonderoga (Wolcott), 64 Great Lakes, 273 Green, Joseph, 27 Grenville, George, 40, 42, 95 Griffits, Hannah, 50, 52, 297n.46 Griswold, Roger. See Lyon-­Griswold affair “Guillotina” (Hopkins), 162, 213 guillotine, 137–­39, 162, 213, 228 “Guillotine, The” (Barlow), 138–­39, 308n.16 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 29, 41 Habermas, Jürgen, 10, 22, 289n.11 Haiti, 157–­58 Hamilton, Alexander, 13, 120; Barlow and, 126; congressional investigations about, 175–­76; as corrupt, 15, 184–­85; death of, 253; Freneau, criticism of, by, 180, 313n.20 Hamiltoniad (Williams), 253–­54, 259, 321n.28 Hancock, John: conspiracy and, 95, 96, 103; Odell and, 107; political style of, parody of, 146–­48; racial beliefs of, parody of, 158–­59, 160–­61 hard money crises, 170 Hartford Convention, 274, 277

Hartford Wits. See Connecticut Wits “Heart of Oak” (Boyce), 47 Hemings, Sally, 163, 242 Henry V (Shakespeare), 77 Hicks, John, 87 history: poetry as agent in, 33, 53, 98, 102, 208, 225, 245, 247; poetry as transcending, 4; progress narrative of, 131, 135, 307n.2 Holt, John, 63–­64, 72 homosexuality, 149–­50 Hopkins, Joseph, 121 Hopkins, Lemuel: conspiracy discourse and, 215; “Democratiad, The,” 5–­7, 192, 201–­5; “Echo, The,” creation of, by, 141; on Jefferson’s racial views, 162, 242; on Miami Wars, 154–­55; New Year’s carrier’s addresses of, 213; as prolific, 308n.18. See also “Anarchiad, The”; “Echo, The” Hopkins, Samuel, 271–­72 Hopkinson, Francis, 76–­78 House of Wisdom in a Bustle (Carey), 227 Howe, William, 20, 33, 56–­57, 76, 297n.2 Hudibras (Butler), 85–­86, 300n.38 Hulton, Henry, 50 human nature: corruption of, 129, 131–­32; as divine, 133; reform of, limits on, 154; Revolutionary violence and, 136, 140 Humphreys, David, 111, 113, 120 Hunt, Isaac, 102, 103, 104 Huske, John, 42 Hutchinson, Thomas, 19 identity: American, 183, 268, 277; of common man, 264; party vs. regional, 163; Peter Pindar and, 190 ideology: Enlightenment philosophy as, 26; of form, 7, 262, 266, 291n.22; ideological mystification, 132, 140; ideological slumber narrative, 209–­11, 302n.2 immigration, 229–­30 impressment, 261 Independent Gazetteer, 158 Ingersoll, Jared, 42 intercolonial communication and cooperation: anti-­Gage versification and, 27–­28, 34, 293n.12; Townshend Act and, 46 international peace movement, 269–­70 Irish people, 229 Irving, Washington, 258 Irving, William, 258, 259–­60 Italy, 139, 207, 209–­10

Index   333 Jackson, Andrew, 274, 280–­81 Jacobins: Bavarian Illuminati and, 214; Republicans as, 148–­49, 189, 251–­52; in Republican poetry, 228; violence of, 137, 140–­41 “Jacobin’s Psalm, For Fast Day,” 223 Jay, John, 107, 185, 191, 200, 315n.48. See also Jay Treaty Jay Treaty, 191–­207; as conspiracy, 189, 196, 200–­201, 204–­5; opposition to, 200–­205; passing of, 204; quasi-­war of 1798 and, 206–­7; support for, 5, 196–­200, 201–­5. See also mock epic Jefferson, Thomas, 13–­14; as advocate of modernity, 255–­56; conspiracies about, 228; formation of Republican party and, 176; French Revolution, support for, by, 237; Freneau and, 180; Alexander Hamilton, censuring of, by, 175; as politically moderate, 230; racial views of, 161–­63, 241–­43; as radical, 234, 262–­63; religious skepticism of, 237, 252; George Washington and, 221, 240, 252. See also Jefferson, Thomas, presidency of; satiric unmasking of Jefferson Jefferson, Thomas, presidency of, 232–­77; elegiac verse in response to, 245–­48, 261; Embargo Act during, 260–­67; Louisiana Purchase, 248–­50, 254–­58. See also Embargo Act of 1807; retrospective literary warfare; satiric unmasking of Jefferson “Jefferson and Liberty,” 221, 236 “Jesus Shall Reign” (Watts), 239 Kentucky resolutions, 216, 219 Key, Francis Scott, 277 Kickapoo Indians, 271–­72 “King’s Own Regulars, The” (Franklin), 75 “Lamentations of General Burgoyne, The” (song), 59 La Montagne, 137 language of liberty/equality/rights, 14; authoritarian use of, 213, 215, 233; democratization and, 147; devotion to, as religious/superstitious, 208–­9, 211–­12, 316n.5; as mere rhetoric, 140–­41, 246; Native Americans and, 255–­57; in patriotic war hymns, 217–­21; revolutionary violence and, 130, 140–­41, 208, 213; use of, growth of, 142 “Laurel of Liberty” (Merry), 144 law: Administration of Justice Act, 19; Bank

bill, 172; British sedition laws, 224; Coercive Acts (Intolerable Acts), 19, 28, 66; Commissioners of Customs Act, 45–­46; demagoguery and, 193; Embargo Act of 1807, 156, 235, 260–­68; Port Act, 19; rational vs. arbitrary, 229. See also Embargo Act of 1807; Stamp Act crisis; Townshend Act, songs and poems on legal authority, contested, 57 Leger, Barry St., 64 Leonard, Samuel, 85, 87, 88 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Dickinson), 46 “Let Us Be Happy as Long as We Can” (Stansbury), 93–­94 Lewis, Eli, 155 Lewis, Meriwether, 248–­50 Liberator, 282, 284 liberty. See language of liberty/equality/rights Liberty and Peace: A Poem (Wheatley), 111 “Liberty Song, The” (Dickinson), 46–­49, 50, 52, 296n.37 “Lines occasioned by reading Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man” (Freneau), 132, 133–­34 linguistic self-­consciousness, 8–­9, 27, 33, 68–­69, 130, 289n.9 literary-­political mirroring, 223–­25 literary referentialism, 4–­7, 127, 288nn.5, 6 Livingston, Brockholst, 195 Livingston, William, 33, 59–­63, 64 London, 132, 223–­24 London Anti-­Jacobin Group, 223–­24 Louisiana Purchase, 248–­50, 254–­58 Louis XVI, 124, 128, 137, 148–­49, 213 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 157 Love of Fame, the Universal Passion (Young), 43 Lowell, James Russell, 284 Loyalists, 104–­5, 134, 276 “Loyalists, The” (Freneau), 104–­5 Lyon, Matthew. See Lyon-­Griswold affair Lyon-­Griswold affair, 225–­29; anti-­partisan poems in response to, 226–­29; partisan poems in response to, 225–­26 Madison, James, 13–­14, 267–­77; Federalist resurgence and, 260–­61; Hamilton and, 170, 173–­74; republicanism of, 185. See also War of 1812 Maid of the Oaks, The (Burgoyne), 28 Mansfield, Earl of, 86, 103 Marshall, Humphrey, 227, 229–­30

334   Index masculinity, 150–­51, 188, 226, 266, 267 Mason, Stevens T., 201–­2 Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768, 23 Massachusetts Constitutional Society, 160–­61 Massachusetts Gazette, 87 Massachusetts Government Act, 19 Massachusetts House of Representatives, 46 Massachusetts Provincial Congress, 74 Mazzei, Philip, 240, 252 McCrea, Jane, 59 Merry, Robert, 144 M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem (Trumbull), 56, 83–­94; Congress and, 83, 300n.35; Hudibras and, 85–­86, 300n.38; length and cantos, 84, 87, 90; mock epic genre, 86–­87, 92, 193–­94, 301n.40; New Proclamation and, 84–­85; popularity of, 3, 84, 92; publication date, 83, 300n.35; revisions, 89, 91–­92; vox populi ideal, 8–­9; “Yankee Doodle” in, 81, 300n.32. See also Trumbull, John Miami Wars, 152–­56, 272 millenialism, 130, 213, 238, 239 Mills, Nathaniel, 87 Milton, John: Freneau and, 100, 302n.5; influence of, on conspiracy verse, 97; Odell and, 303n.20 mock epic, 5, 191–­205; Aristocracy: An Epic Poem, 196–­200; Democracy: An Epic Poem, 193–­96; Democratiad, 5–­7, 192, 201–­5; Freneau and, 100; by Hartford Wits, 110; Hudibras and, 86, 300n.38; M’Fingal and, 86–­87, 92, 301n.40; Porcupiniad, 225; purpose of, 193; vs. versification, 85. See also “Anarchiad, The” modernization, 255–­57 monarchy: critique of, 131–­33; divine right of kings, 132; moral argument against, 137; as vampiric, 133–­34 monological discourse, 88, 89, 301n.42 Monroe, James, 228 Monthly Anthology, 247, 259 Monthly Register, Magazine, and Review of the United States, 258 Moore, Frank, 59–­60 “Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody” (Shaftesbury), 144 morality, 143–­44, 166, 270–­71 More, Hannah, 270 Morton, Sarah Wentworth, 134 Moultrie, William, 149 “Mr. Jay’s Treaty” (Freneau), 201

Munford, William, 227–­29 Murray, William, Earl of Mansfield, 86, 103 Museum, 188–­90, 225 National Bank, 170, 185, 290n.17 National Convention, 211–­12 national debt, 170, 191 National Gazette, 14, 134, 150, 152–­53, 175, 180–­81 national unity: patriotism and, 237; quasi-­war of 1798 and, 219–­20; as trope, 238–­39. See also partisanship; regionalism Native Americans: anti-­Native American propaganda, 59; Burgoyne and, 61, 297n.5; exclusion of, from public sphere, 10; Jefferson’s policy toward, 254–­57; Miami Wars, 152–­56, 272; removal policies toward, 16, 257; rights of, 152–­56, 165 nature: as benevolent, 143–­44; God, displacement of, by, 146; progressivism and, 249–­50 nature of man. See human nature Netherlands, 139 New Collection of Verses Applied to the First of November, A.D. 1765, &c. Including a Prediction that the S---p A-­t shall not take Place in North America, A (Stamp Act poem), 38–­39, 295n.25 New Criticism, 4 New England: activism in, in response to Embargo Act, 261–­62; antiwar activism in, 274; clergymen of, 221; regional identity of, 163–­64, 264, 266 New England Palladium, 232 New Hampshire, 188 New-­Haven Gazette: “Anarchiad, The” in, 113; Connecticut Wits in, 120–­22, 123 New Jersey Gazette, 76 New Orleans, 273, 274 Newport Mercury, 28 New Proclamation, A! (Trumbull), 3, 29–­30, 84–­85, 293n.14. See also M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem (Trumbull) newsboy poems. See carrier’s addresses News-­Boy’s Christmas and New Year’s Verses, The. Humbly Address’d to the Gentleman and Ladies to whom he carries the Boston Evening-­Post, 35 “News Lad’s Address,” 157 “New Song, A, to the tune of the British grenadier” (Sewall), 75–­76

Index   335 “New Song, to the Tune of Hearts of Oak, A” (“The Liberty Song”) (Dickinson), 46–­49, 50, 52, 296n.37 newspapers: Alien and Sedition Acts and, 216; debates in, 141–­42; function of, 55; partisanship, growth of, in, 208; as public sphere, 10–­12, 290nn.13, 16. See also carrier’s addresses New Year’s Ode, for the Year 1766, Being actually dictated, by Lawrence Swinney, Carrier of News, Enemy to Stamps, a Friend to the Constitution, and an Englishman every Inch, 36 New Year’s poems. See carrier’s addresses New York Democratic Society, 193–­96 New-­York Gazetteer, 102 New-­York Journal, 193 New-­York Journal, and the General Advertiser, 63 North American Review, 259 North Briton, 40, 295n.27 Northwest Territories, 191, 271 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 161, 162, 240–­43 Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (Price), 131 Odell, Jonathan, 68–­75, 95; “American Times,” 105–­8, 303n.20; Arnold and, 108, 109; Freneau and, 106, 109; “Word of Congress, The,” 56, 68–­75 Ohio River Valley, 152 Old Regime, 136 “On the American and French Revolutions” (Freneau), 131 “On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis” (Adams), 249–­50 “On the Discoveries of Captain Lewis” (Barlow), 248–­50 “On the Progress of the French Armies in Italy” (Freneau), 209–­10 “On the Proposed American Negotiation with the French Republic” (Freneau), 209 Oppression. A Poem. By an American. With Notes, by a North Briton (anonymous), 39–­44, 45, 295n.30 Otis, James, 46 Paine, Robert Treat, Jr., 217 Paine, Thomas, 72, 132, 234, 237, 257 panegyrics, 234; after Jefferson’s election, 235–­37; about War of 1812, 271

Panic of 1792, 174 Papal States, 209–­10 paper currency and credit, 112, 114, 115, 117–­18, 304n.26, 304n.27, 306n.36 Paradise Lost (Milton): conspiracy verse, influence of, on, 97; Freneau and, 100; M’Fingal and, 91; Odell and, 107, 303n.20 Paris, 136 Paris Peace Treaty, 199–­200 Parliament, 19 parody, 26. See also versification “Parody of a Well-­Known Liberty Song, A” (song), 48–­50 “Parody on a Late Proclamation, A” (anti-­Gage versification), 25–­26 “Parody Parodized, The, Or the Massachusetts Song of Liberty” (song), 50 partisanship: bipartisanship, 254; Embargo Act and, 268; Era of Good Feelings, 276–­77, 279, 323n.61; literary warfare as cause of, 246–­47; of poetry wars, 13–­18; political moderation and, 226–­30 patriotism: British, 224; Embargo Act and, 265–­68; political unity and, 237; quasi-­war of 1798, patriotic songs/poems in response to, 217–­21; transnationalism and, 269–­70; War of 1812 and, 235, 277. See also American Revolution, songs and poems of Patriots, 88, 91, 276. See also American Revolution; American Revolution, songs and poems of Patriots of North America, The: A Sketch (Cooper), 102, 103–­4, 303n.12 Paulding, James Kirke, 258 Pelagianism, 144, 150 Pennsylvania Evening Post, 61 Pennsylvania Journal, 81 Pennsylvania Packet, 61–­62, 76 “People’s Friend,” 236 Peri Bathous (Pope), 195 “Peter Pindar” (Wolcot), 181–­82; Federalist use of, 188–­90; “Probationary Odes” and, 182–­88 Philadelphia: Congress relocation to, 170; Democratic-­Republican Society of, 185–­86; Jay Treaty, pamphleting against, in, 202; Philadelphia Convention, 116–­17, 306n.34 Philadelphia Jockey Club, The: Or, Mercantile Influence Weighed. Consisting of Select Characters Taken from the Club of Addressers, by Timothy Tickler, 5

336   Index Pickering, Timothy, 222 Pills, Poetical, Political, and Philosophical (Fessenden), 252 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 208–­9 Pitt, William, 181 Poem on the Happiness of America, A (Humphrey), 111 Poems Written and Published During the American Revolution (Freneau), 250 poetics of resistance, 52 poetry: as agent in history, 12–­13, 33, 53, 98, 102, 208, 225, 245, 247; authors of, 10–­12; elegiac verse, 108, 245–­48, 261; epic genre, 100, 115–­16; fast-­day psalms, 221–­24; ideology of form, 7, 9, 17, 262, 266, 291n.22; insignificance of, 151; linguistic self-­consciousness, 8–­9, 27, 33, 68–­69, 130, 289n.9; lyricization of, 4, 247, 281, 288n.3; panegyrics, 234, 235–­37, 271; as performative act, 8, 9, 289n.9; power of, 2, 8; of protest, 282–­85; as retreat from politics, 246–­47; as source of aesthetic pleasure, 247; truth and, 252; uniqueness of, 9, 289n.9; vs. verse, 282, 288n.2. See also affective language; anti-­speculation poetry; carrier’s addresses; mock epic; panegyrics; satire; songs; versification; vox populi poetry wars, 1–­3, 7; decline of, 247–­48, 279–­80; dilution strategy of, 221; partisanship of, 13–­18; quality of poetry, 3–­4, 287n.2; referentialism of, 4–­7, 288nn.5, 6; retrospective literary warfare, 248–­58; as transnational, 16–­17, 223–­25. See also retrospective literary warfare “Political Contest” (Munford), 227–­29 Political Green House, For the Year 1798 (Alsop, Dwight), 213–­14, 229 “Pomposo and His Printer” (Freneau), 180–­81 Pope, Alexander: Augustan satire and, 39–­40, 68–­69, 195; Dunciad, 5, 100, 113–­14, 144, 160, 183, 195, 305n.29; Peter Pindar character and, 183; poetry of conspiracy and, 97, 100; on Shaftesbury, 144. See also Dunciad, The Porcupine’s Gazette, 224–­25 Porcupiniad (Carey), 225 Port Act, 19 Port Folio, 245–­47, 259 Portugal, 193 presidential hymns, 169–­70, 217–­20, 236–­37, 280–­81

Price, Richard, 131 Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, 181 “Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar” (Tucker), 181–­88; corruption narrative in, 183–­85; Federalist response to, 188–­90; Peter Pindar, character of, in, 181–­83, 187–­88; Republicanism of, 185–­86 “Proclamation, A” (anti-­Burgoyne versification, Livingston), 59–­63, 64 “Proclamation, A” (anti-­Gage versification), 24–­25 proclamations, 20–­23, 56–­65, 292nn.4, 5; by Burgoyne, 58–­64; vs. congressional declarations, 2, 8–­9, 44–­45, 69–­70; by Howe, 56–­57; intent of, 20, 22–­23, 292n.2; length and ceremony of titles, 28–­29, 30, 58, 59–­60. See also Gage, Thomas, proclamations by; versification progressivism: American Revolution and, 128–­29; human perfectability and, 131; Jefferson’s Native American policy and, 256–­57; Louisiana Purchase, celebration of, and, 248, 249–­50; morality and, 137; of Republicans, 205; as superstitious, 213; theory of history in, 307n.2; utopian end of, 145 Progress of Dulness, The (Trumbull), 29 Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (Robison), 214 propaganda, 219, 222–­23 protests. See activism/protests Protocols of Liberty (Warner), 28, 293n.12 “Psalm for the Federal Fast,” 222–­23 Public Advertiser (London newspaper), 67, 74 public sphere, 10–­12, 279, 289nn.11, 12 Puritans, 147–­48, 309n.25 quasi-­war of 1798, 150, 156; background of, 206–­7; patriotic war hymns about, 217–­21 race/racism: public sphere, participation in, and, 10; racial equality, 158–­61; racial stereotypes, 159; scientific justifications for, 241–­43. See also African Americans; Native Americans; slavery Randolph, John, 185, 228 “Reflections in Solitude” (Ewing), 246 “Reflections in the City” (Sergeant), 247 regionalism, 14; antislavery rhetoric and, 163–­64; Embargo Act and, 266, 268; during War of 1812, 272–­73; following War of 1812, 276–­77. See also West, American

Index   337 religion: Catholicism, 209–­10; divine right of kings, 132; fast-­day psalms, 221–­24; human moral depravity in, 129; Puritans, 147–­48, 309n.25; religious orders, 131; revolutionary fervor as, 211–­12; vs. secularism, 257; skepticism toward, 252; slavery and, 157; as superstition, 207. See also Satanic imagery “Remarks on the Jacobiniad” (Gardiner), 160–­61 Report on Public Credit (Hamilton), 170 “Republican Genius of Europe” (Freneau), 139–­40 republicanism, classical: as agrarian, 255–­56; vs. aristocracy, 173; citizens of, requirements of, 131–­32; vs. democracy, 194, 320n.16; vs. enlightenment rationalism, 128–­29; vs. popularism, 193; principles of, 199; theory of history in, 307n.2 Republican poetry: against antiwar Federalists, 273–­75; on French Revolution, 127–­28, 131–­36, 137–­39; about Lyon-­Griswold affair, 226–­30; pro-­embargo, 264–­68; retrospective, 248–­50, 253; in support of Jefferson, 235–­37, 243–­44, 261. See also Barlow, Joel; Freneau, Philip; Tucker, St. George Republicans, 13–­16; Embargo Act, support for, by, 264–­65; ideology of, vs. Federalists, 255, 255–­57; masculinity and, 150; militarism of, 156; patriotic war hymns, response to, by, 220–­21; philosophy of, 181, 185, 230, 233; popularity of, 244–­45; as Puritanical, 309n.25; quasi-­war of 1798, opposition to, by, 206–­7, 209; as radicals, 130, 140, 148, 228, 252; slavery, support for, by, 16, 157–­58, 160–­65. See also Democratic-­ Republican societies; Jefferson, Thomas, presidency of; Madison, James; republicanism, classical retrospective literary warfare, 248–­58; Barlow-­Adams exchange, 248–­50; about Jefferson’s second inaugural speech, 254–­58 Revolutionary War. See American Revolution rhetoric of conspiracy. See conspiracy discourse Rhode Island, currency and, 112, 114, 115, 117–­18, 306n.36 Richards, George, 127–­29 rights: Enlightenment justifications for, 129–­30; of Native Americans, 152–­56, 165; vs. social equality, 158–­61; of states, 185. See also language of liberty/equality/rights “Rights of Black Men” (Bishop), 157

Rittenhouse, David, 70 Rivington, James, 31, 85, 87, 93, 303n.12 Rivington’s New-­York Gazetteer, 102 Robespierre, François Marie Isidore de, 207 Robison, John, 214 Rolliad, 181 Romanticism, 281 Rome, 207, 233 Rose, Aquila, 34 Royal Gazette, 93, 103, 301n.49 “Rule Brittania” (Thomson), 218 Salmagundi, 247, 258–­60 Satanic imagery: “Battle of the Kegs,” 77; in conspiracy discourse, 174, 187, 203–­4, 253; Freneau and, 102, 103–­4, 302n.5; in “Jacobin’s Psalm,” 223; Odell and, 106, 108, 303n.20; in Paradise Lost, 97, 107, 302n.5, 303n.20 satire, 12; role of, 186; “satire of the times” genre, 39, 44, 105, 281. See also Augustan satire; mock epic; satiric unmasking of Jefferson; versification satiric unmasking of Jefferson, 237–­44; failure of, 243–­44, 277; about inaugural speeches, 238–­40, 254–­58; about scholarship/ naturalism, 240–­43, 249–­50; strategy of, 237–­38, 243–­44 science: morality and, 137; racism and, 241–­43; utopianism and, 131 secularism, 211–­12, 257 self-­interest, 118, 306n.36 sentimentalism: as effeminate, 150; about immigration, 229; in Miami Wars poems, 155; and moral/political transgression, 149; parody of, 143, 144, 255; in Stamp Act poems, 295n.25; during War of 1812, 271 September massacres, 134, 148–­49 Sergeant, Thomas, 247 Seven Years’ War, 47 Sewall, Jonathan, 75 sex/sexuality: Jefferson’s racial views on, 242–­43; racial stereotypes and, 162; sentimentalism and, 149–­50 Shaftesbury, Lord, 144 Shawnee Indians, 152–­56, 271–­72 Shays, Daniel, 114 Shays’ rebellion, 113, 297n.1, 304n.27; “Anarchiad, The” and, 114, 115–­16, 117, 119, 306n.38; mob rule and, 92; self-­interest and, 306n.36

338   Index slavery: abolition of, 156–­58, 159–­60, 162, 310n.35, 311nn.46, 47; American Revolution and, 110–­11; expansion of, in West, 164; federal government, power over, by, 163–­64; Thomas Jefferson and, 161–­63, 241–­43; slave revolts, 156–­57 Smith, Adam, 143 Smith, Elihu Hubbard, 141, 193 “Solemn League and Covenant” (Boston Committee of Correspondence), 23 “Song Of spunky Jonathan,” 265–­66 songs: embargo songs, 262–­68; occasional vs. topical, 237; performance of, 9–­10, 16, 47, 50, 80–­82, 220, 237, 317n.18; presidential hymns, 169–­70, 217–­20, 236–­37, 280–­81; in response to quasi-­war of 1798, 217–­21. See also American Revolution, songs and poems of; embargo songs; Townshend Act, songs and poems on Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution (Moore), 59 Sons of Liberty, 36, 48, 49–­50, 51 Sons of St. George, 93 South Sea Bubble, 172–­73, 312n.9 Spain, 139, 315n.48 “Speculator, The” (Freneau), 174–­75, 312n.13 speculators, 169–­79; anti-­speculation rhetoric, satire of, 176–­79; anti-­speculator poetry, 171–­75, 182–­85; speculative bubbles, 174. See also anti-­speculation poetry Stamp Act crisis, 1, 33–­45; anti-­Stamp Act poems, 34–­45, 52; carrier’s addresses, 34–­39, 44, 52; high-­Augustan satire, 39–­45, 69; newsboys and, 34–­37, 52; political climate during, 35–­36; protests, 23, 35–­36, 37, 294n.24; reaction to repeal in North America vs. Britain, 45; repeal of Stamp Act, 39, 45 Stansbury, Joseph, 93–­94, 108 “Stanzas on the arrival of Congress in Philadelphia,” 170 “Star-­Spangled Banner” (Key), 277 St. Clair, Arthur, 155, 272 St. Clair’s Defeat. A Poem. (Lewis), 155 St. Domingue, 157, 165 stock exchange, 173 Story, Isaac, 189 Stuart, John, Earl of Bute, 40, 42, 86, 95, 103 sublime affect, 143, 146. See also affective language Swift, Jonathan, 79

“Symptoms of the Millennium, in the Year 1801,” 238–­40 taxes, 112, 239. See also Stamp Act crisis; Townshend Act, songs and poems on tea boycott, 52 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 82–­83, 300n.34 Terror, 136, 137–­41, 177–­78, 213, 308n.12 Thomas Gage’s Proclamation Versified (Freneau), 29 Thomson, James, 218 Times, The. A Poem (Church), 39–­40, 42, 105 “To Arms, Colombia!” (Paine), 218 “To Echo” (Tucker), 151 To Perpetuate the Memory of Peace (Crispianus), 111 Tory party, 223–­24 “To the Advocates for War,” 270 Townshend Act, songs and poems on, 45–­54; “Female Patriots,” 50–­51; “Liberty Song, The,” 46–­49, 50, 296n.37; “Parody of a Well-­Known Liberty song,” 48–­50; “Parody Parodized,” 50 Townshend Act protests, 23, 39, 52 trade: after American Revolution, 112; Embargo Act of 1807, 156, 235, 260–­68; nonimportation debate, 267–­68; transatlantic, 191; war, prevention of, with, 262; West Indian, 209, 261. See also Embargo Act of 1807 Trumbull, John, 29–­31, 83–­94; “Anarchiad, The,” 113; anti-­Gage versification by, 20, 83, 84; in Connecticut Wits, 111; ideological evolution of, 90; New Proclamation and, 29–­30, 84–­85, 293n.14; Odell and, 106. See also M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem (Trumbull) Tucker, St. George, 14, 15; “Echo” authors, criticism of, by, 150–­51; election of 1800 and, 234; Freneau and, 188; Munford and, 228. See also “Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar” United States: Canada and, 261–­62; as imperialist, 155–­56; legitimacy of government of, 169, 177–­78, 179; literary independence of, from Britain, 4; national debt of, 156, 191; as nation of immigrants, 229–­30; political destiny of, 207; political identity of, 183, 191, 277. See also national unity

Index   339 “United States, The” (Stansbury), 93 U.S. Congress: as aristocratic, 201; Articles of Association, 66; currency circulation and, 3042n.6; elections of 1798, 221; federal electors, appointment of, by, 146–­47; formation of, 28; frugality of, 243; on government titles, 167; Jay Treaty and, 200–­201, 204; land speculation and, 155–­56; Lyon-­Griswold affair, 225–­29; during Miami wars, 155; Provincial, 28; quasi-­war of 1798 and, 209; speculation profits by, 175–­76, 182–­85; versification against, 20, 65–­73, 95. See also Lyon-­ Griswold affair; U.S. Congress, declarations of U.S. Congress, declarations of, 44–­45, 54; anonymity of, 70; Declaration of Independence, 56, 57, 68; vs. proclamations, 2, 8–­9, 44–­45, 69–­70 U.S. Constitution, 138; Alien and Sedition Acts and, 216; celebratory poems about, 169–­70; debates about, 116–­17, 119–­20, 198, 306n.34; federal government, limits of, and, 185; ratification of, 110, 123 U.S. military: Miami wars, 152–­56, 272; quasi-­war of 1798 and, 207; size of, 243. See also American Revolution; War of 1812 U.S. Treasury, 170–­71, 175 utopianism, 131, 145, 213 Vergennes, comte de, 199–­200, 315n.48 verse parodies. See versification versification, 278; affective language and, 178; anti-­Burgoyne, 59–­63; anti-­Howe, 33, 56–­57; Association, The, 66–­67; British and Loyalist, anti-­Congress, 65–­73, 74; broadside printing of, 27; as disruptive strategy, 142; as effeminate, 150–­51; end to popularity, 57; Freneau, 29; vs. mock epic poetry, 85; nonsatirical, 26–­27; “pump verse” or pasquinade subgenre, 34; purpose of, 144; revival of, in “The Echo,” 141; set to music, 66–­67; Trumbull, 29–­31, 293n.14; as war propaganda, 32–­33; “Word of Congress,” 68–­75. See also “Echo, The”; proclamations; Stamp Act crisis versification, anti-­Gage, 19–­20, 24–­34, 292n.4; broadside printing of, 27; Freneau, 32, 98, 99–­102; intercolonial communication and cooperation, 27–­28, 34, 293n.12; New Proclamation, 3, 29–­30, 84–­85, 293n.14;

Trumbull, 29–­31, 83, 84, 293n.14; Voyage to Boston, 99–­102. See also Gage, Thomas, proclamations by versification vogue, 7, 8–­9, 65, 292n.2; anti-­Gage versification and, 20, 22, 26–­28, 292n.4; poetry as agent and, 33, 53 “Versifier, The,” 178–­79 Virginia, 148, 275 Virginia Gazette, 24, 148 Virginia resolution, 216 virtue, 23–­24, 129, 150 Vision of Columbus (Barlow), 111, 124–­25, 307n.45 vox populi, 9–­10, 11–­12, 15; congressional declarations as, 70; Federalists as, 261, 276–­77; “Female Patriots” and, 50–­51; “Liberty Song” as, 47; in M’Fingal, 89–­90; regionalism and, 272–­73; Republicans as, 235, 236; sailors as, 264; Stamp Act and, 36, 37, 52 Voyage to Boston, A (Freneau), 99–­102, 106, 107–­8, 303n.7 Walpole, Robert, 27, 41 war: vs. economic inactivity, 266; Embargo Act as form of, 266–­68; Franco-­British war, 209; glorification of, 139–­40; international peace movement, 269–­70; Miami Wars, 152–­56, 272; quasi-­war of 1798, 150, 156, 206–­7, 217–­21. See also American Revolution; quasi-­war of 1798; War of 1812 War of 1812, 156, 235, 260, 268–­77; consequences of, for Federalists, 18, 273–­77; Federalist antiwar poetry during, 268–­73 Warren, Mercy Otis, 52 war songs/poems, 217–­21. See also American Revolution, songs and poems of Washington, George, 13–­14; “Adam’s Fall: The Trip to Cambridge,” 80; John Adams and, 218–­19; Barlow and, 126; commissioned as commander in chief, 74; death of, 232; Democratic-­Republican societies and, 160, 191, 196; Hopkinson letter to, 76; Jay Treaty and, 189, 206; Thomas Jefferson and, 221, 240, 252; National Bank and, 185; Odell and, 108, 303n.20; poetry of conspiracy and, 95; versification against, 20; Wheatley and, 110; “Yankee Doodle” and, 82. See also Shays’ rebellion; speculators Watts, Isaac, 239 Wayne, Anthony, 78–­79

340   Index Weekly Inspector, 259–­60 West, American: Embargo Act of 1807 and, 235, 277; Era of Good Feelings and, 276; imperial expansion in, 282; influence of, on government, 272; land speculation in, 155–­56; Lewis and Clark expedition, 248–­50; slavery, expansion of, to, 164, 282; vox populi ideal and, 264 Wheatley, Phillis, 110–­11 “Whig, The. A Song” (published in Rivington’s New-­York Gazetteer), 102 Whig party: conspiracy discourse and, 96, 183; Freneau and, 102; Holt and, 63; Townshend Act and, 45, 47 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 164, 283–­84 Wilkes, John, 40, 42, 295n.27 Williams, John, 253–­54 Williams, William, 120–­21 “William Wimble Letters” (Connecticut Wits), 114, 120–­22, 305n.31

Wolcot, John, 134. See also “Peter Pindar” Wolcott, Oliver, 222 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 132 women: exclusion from public sphere, 10; Female Patriot, No. 1, 52–­53; “Female Patriots,” 50–­51; Jefferson’s racial views and, 162, 242–­43 “Word of Congress, The” (Odell), 68–­75 XYZ dispatches, 207; Bavarian Illuminati and, 214–­15; criticism of, 225; patriotic war hymns in response to, 217–­18 “Yankee Doodle,” 80–­83, 299n.31, 300n.32; in pro-­embargo songs, 265–­68; “Visit to Camp” stanzas, 82, 300n.33 “Yankee Doodle’s Expedition to Rhode Island,” 80 Young, Edward, 39, 40, 43, 68, 70, 105

Acknowledgments

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n earlier version of a portion of Chapter 5 appeared in Early American Literature under the title “Aaron Burr, Aristocracy and the Poetry of Conspiracy” (2004). Several strands of the book’s overall argument appeared in brief in my chapter “Revolutionary Verse” in The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (2007). This book would not have been possible without the generous support of many individuals and organizations, both public and private. I am grateful, first, to the National Endowment for the Humanities and to St. Olaf College for providing fellowships and grants that helped me carve out time for research and writing. I thank the library staffs at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, Carleton College, and St. Olaf College for helping me to locate numerous rare and fugitive poems. Finally, on behalf of all scholars of early American culture working today, I’m grateful to the unnamed technological wizards who have transformed the process and scope of our research by digitizing the historical imprints and newspapers we study. Among other things, they have freed us from dwelling permanently in library basements with rolls of microfilm in our arms. My intellectual debts are too many to enumerate, but I wish to thank several colleagues whose time and labor helped me make this book far better than it otherwise would have been. Max Cavitch read an early version of the entire manuscript and offered a number of excellent recommendations, and David Waldstreicher provided useful feedback on specific parts. The anonymous reviewers at the University of Pennsylvania Press guided me in several fruitful

342   Acknowledgments directions, and I thank Bob Lockhart for his helpful suggestions and advice along the way. I give special thanks to Joey Putnam, who worked with me as a research assistant at the crucial final stage of manuscript preparation. My understanding of early American poetry has benefited from the countless insights I’ve gleaned from my fellow scholars, through their published work, conference papers and lectures, and conversations. I offer a collective thanks to the many participants of the Society of Early Americanists biennial conference, where I’ve received invaluable feedback from colleagues too many to name. Conversations with colleagues at St. Olaf, Carleton, and the University of Minnesota have guided my research over the years, and I thank, in particular, Eric Fure-​­Slocum, Steve Hahn, and Jon Naito for giving me specific gems of advice at important points in the process. I’m still indebted to my graduate school professors, Bill Dowling, Michael Warner, and the late Richard Poirier for inspiring me to do this work. Finally, and most important, I am forever indebted to the three people to whom this book is dedicated—​ ­my wife, Martha, and my daughters, Maggie and Lizzie—​­for the love and happiness that have sustained me over the years.