Читать книгу Poetry Wars - Colin Wells - Страница 9

Chapter 1

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 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—not 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 subjects, interpellating its audience as subject to the king’s coercive power as much as to the concrete directives of the proclamation itself.²

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.

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

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 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,

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,

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 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 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 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.

As in the earlier anti-Gage versifications, Trumbull highlights Gage’s self-conscious 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 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 versifications 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 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 illustrated when we compare carrier addresses printed just prior to the passage of the Stamp Act with those published immediately after. The Boston Evening-Post’s poem from December of 1764, for instance—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—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 carrier’s address—from mouthpiece of the British Empire to vox populi—had 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 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 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

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 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:

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 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 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:

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 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 its authority to tax and whether such duties violated the constitution’s protection against depriving subjects of liberty or property without their consent—what would before long be rendered in shorthand as “taxation without 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 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 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 literary 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 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 administration 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 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 implied back-and-forth exchange between the conflicting “Female Patriot” 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 embargo 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 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.