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ОглавлениеChapter 2
War and Literary War
The 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 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 succeeded 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-Bay, establishing a functioning provincial government, with an executive, a 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 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 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:
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):
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 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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, / … / 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.
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 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
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 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 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 that American literature produced throughout this period is characterized by an unacknowledged acceptance of cultural Englishness. Within this reading—as 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 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 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 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;
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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
