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CHAPTER 1

Balladmongering and Social Life

Peddling Ballads

When John Greenleaf Whittier was a boy, the routine on his family’s isolated farm was periodically interrupted and enlivened by the appearance of “Yankee gypsies,” a motley parade of beggars, peddlers, vagrants, and wanderers, who broke the monotony of farm life by stopping over to beg, preach, sell their wares, sing, or sleep in the barn. One of these gypsies, “a ‘pawky auld carle’ of a wandering Scotchman,” introduced Whittier to the songs of Burns, which would become his most important literary model: “after eating his bread and cheese and drinking his mug of cider he gave us Bonny Doon, Highland Mary, and Auld Lang Syne. He had a rich, full voice, and entered heartily into the spirit of his lyrics.” But Whittier reserved his warmest memories for a different character:

Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler and poet, physician and parson,—a Yankee troubadour,—first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger branches of the family. No lovesick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer’s verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our country seclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter’s Tale, we listened with infinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new subject, his rhymes flowed freely, “as if he had eaten ballads and all men’s ears grew to his tunes.”¹

Whittier’s essay, despite its sheen of ironic nostalgia, portrays a rural culture defined by vagrancy, homelessness, and decentralization, a depiction of New England at odds with the colonial mystique that emerged during the postbellum years, when Whittier’s best-selling poem Snow-Bound (1866) strongly impressed a domestic ideal of early New England rusticity upon the public imagination.² In Snow-Bound, Whittier characterized his youth as a world of songs and lore, told and retold around the fireside by an intimate domestic circle of family and friends. In “Yankee Gypsies,” however, traditions of song and poetry come from outside the home and hearth, in the person of the traveling peddler, a figure that combines cultural and economic exchanges in complex ways. Before being perceived as literature, Plummer’s “verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts,” are objects on sale, just like the “pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread … jack-knives, razors, and soap” that also come out of his pack, and the poems’ performance as goods for purchase helps incorporate the Whittiers into an economic system of exchange.

Yet Whittier’s description of the balladmonger occludes the relationship between the economic and the poetic: although Whittier may have meant the “Yankee gypsy” to seem quaint to his readers, itinerant peddlers like Plummer were actually agents of modernization in rural New England. According to William J. Gilmore, peddlers were part of an “informal” circulation system that helped bring both print reading and market economies to all but the most remote areas of New England. Peddlers not only interrupted the “country seclusion” of rural farms but also purveyed an array of matter uncommon to life there, and the almanacs, broadsides, and chapbooks that constituted the majority of a peddler’s print stock provided rural readers with “the key bridge between traditional intensive reading fare and novels, travel accounts, and other newer forms of reading matter.”³ The vagrant peddler in Whittier’s essay is pure “outside”: coming from somewhere else, he destabilizes the insularity of the home, bringing the world in and pulling the family out. Yet though he sells “the raw material” of news, scandal, and gossip, he seems an irruption from antiquity, encircled with “the very nimbus of immortality.” His liminal position secures this power, and its medium is the ballad. Residing in and out of literature, and in and out of time, the balladmonger and his wares condense an image of decentralized culture and the grassroots dissemination of news and knowledge.

If broadside poems like those sold by Jonathan Plummer helped to pull the rural world into the orbit of a more modern and urban realm, then it is all the more striking that Whittier identifies the peddler with exotic and older modes of tradition—gypsy, troubadour, minstrel—rather than with the contemporary “Yankee peddler,” which by the 1840s typified (in the figure of “Sam Slick,” for example) the New Englander as an amoral sharper.⁴ For Whittier, Plummer’s verses and the exchange value they accrue emblematize a history he locates in “the ballad”: “His productions answered, as nearly as I can remember, to Shakespeare’s description of a proper ballad,—‘doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant theme sung lamentably.’”⁵ “The ballad” figures Whittier’s conflicted representation of a poet whose wares seem not to be “poetry” in any secure sense. Plummer, after all, is a source for both printed objects and songs sung spontaneously: in the essay, the economic exchange of broadsides is complemented by Plummer’s “ready improvisation” on a suggested topic, which succeeds so wonderfully that Whittier imagines him creating the very possibility of oral culture itself. Blending these modes of circulation creates a poet with an eccentric relation to space and time. Plummer is “a Yankee troubadour” and the “first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac,” akin to Autolycus, the archetype of early modern balladry. Each of these terms—troubadour, minstrel, and balladeer—places Plummer in an imagined poetic culture of unspecified antiquity. But his poems report current events—drownings, epidemics, fires, executions, and so on—and his creative performances supplement the objects (including the broadside poems) that are, literally, his stock-in-trade.

“Yankee Gypsies” vacillates between young Whittier’s enchantment with the sale of printed broadsides and his enthusiasm for Plummer’s minstrel-like performances of ballads. The essay therefore offers an outlook—however obscured and ambivalent—upon a rural, local culture of poetry constituted by a system of hybrid exchanges (economic and bardic, print mediated and oral, ephemeral and ancient); such a system necessarily lies outside the institutionally sanctioned, author-centered, national tradition that Whittier and his fellow Fireside Poets were later imagined to have inaugurated. The circulation of poems in this other poetic culture was a social process facilitated by exchanges of cheap print, old tunes, and new songs and made up of genres like execution sermons, shipwreck poems, disaster laments, satirical ballads, and mournful elegies. Whittier’s description gives further insight into the protocols of this world: he cherished the memory of Plummer selling and singing his songs to the gathered family but made no mention of anyone privately reading these poems alone in their room. And despite the “nimbus of immortality” encircled around Plummer’s brow in Whittier’s young eyes, Plummer’s poems seem to have no intrinsic value as “literature”—their meaning and value lay in their social transmission, the way they retold scandals or disasters to a group gathered to hear them sung. Aesthetic distinction, formal or linguistic complexity, and the celebration of universal or national ideals are not criteria of merit because consuming (“reading” seems not the right word) a peddler’s poems offered other kinds of pleasure.

Sarah Emery, who grew up in nearby Newburyport around the same time, recalled that in her girlhood, “an old lame peddler named Urin … came round five or six times a year.”

Old Urin was quite a character. He would stump in, usually near dusk, with a bag and basket, and sinking into the nearest chair, declare himself “e’en a’most dead, he was so lame!” Then, without stopping to take breath, he would reel off, “Tree fell on me when I was a boy, killed my brother and me jest like him, here’s books, pins, needles, black sewing silk all colors, tapes varses, almanacks and sarmons, thread, fine thread for cambric ruffles, here’s varses on the pirate that was hung on Boston Common, solemn varses with a border of coffins atop, and Noble’s sarmon preached at this wife’s funeral, the’lection sarmon when the guv’ner took the chair, Jack the Piper, Whittington’s Cat, Pilgrim’s Progress, Bank of Faith, The History of the Devil, and a great many other religious books.” We always kept the old man over night besides purchasing his wares. As I had an eager avidity for books, the peddler’s advent was hailed with delight.⁶

Emery’s marked inflection of “varses” and “sarmons” places these materials in a pointed relation to literariness, with the accented words clearly intended to contrast the peddler’s matter with a legitimate standard against which it fell short. Yet if the proximate distinction between “varses” and “verses” marks the first as a debased version of the second, the proximity also blurs this same distinction, collapsing the space between legitimate and illegitimate forms just as the cheap broadsides hawked by the lame peddler work their way into the middle-class parlor. The conflicted irony of these accounts indicates the complexity of the poetic culture in early nineteenth-century New England, a time and place where varses and verses could mingle without strongly enforced rules of genre or taste.

The careers of “Old Urin” and Plummer also show how poems, when peddled by a local character, could deploy a wide range of meanings to elicit a wide range of responses. A poem’s circulation and the medium (or media) by which it traveled and was consumed shaped its value in important ways. Such meanings and values begin with the poems’ sources, the itinerant peddlers who “circulated the widest variety of printed matter available in America, a selection broader than all but the most daring bookstores sold.”⁷ The peddler’s “matter,” and the way he sold it, also shaped people’s experiences of media like print. Histories of the book in North America have detailed how “print” was itself mediated in early American culture. Michael Warner has argued that the “New England printing trade and its cultural settings were anything but monolithic” but were instead a decentralized and heterogeneous set of structures and relations, a point also made by book historians like Gilmore, David D. Hall, and Meredith L. McGill.⁸ These structures and relations could underwrite the institutional authority of the ministry and the state, or the cultural authority of writers like Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts, while also creating a “counterpublic print discourse in broadsides and cheap pamphlets” that depended “on an invisible worthlessness for its very existence. Not only did it have to be cheap in order to be hawked in the countryside, but in order to be counterpublic … it had to be ‘foolish,’ that is, without status.”⁹ If Pope or Watts stand atop a hierarchy of literary power, Plummer’s broadsides—cheap, lurid, hawked in the street and the countryside—would seem to lie at the bottom. But Emery and Whittier show that these poems clearly had value that was neither literary nor economic.

Their accounts also show that the broadsides hawked by peddlers like Urin and Plummer helped to establish the cultural meanings of poems among readers just as much as the works of Pope, Watts, Milton, or Byron. Worthington Chauncey Ford and Richardson Wright long ago noted that broadside poems, which were cheap to print, easy to distribute, and reliably popular, helped to sustain many printers by offering the prospect of steady sales with relatively small financial and legal risk.¹⁰ At the same time, broadside peddlers and their poems gave readers a relation to literature that was ephemeral, worldly, heterodox, and often illicit (a Newburyport writer alleged that Plummer also sold pornography, which may have been broadly true of itinerant peddling as a trade).¹¹ These peddlers reached farm boys like Whittier and urbane readers like Emery, incorporating them into a shared poetic culture characterized by a heady delight in the cheap, the sensational, the timely, and the lurid. While “varses” and “sarmons” may have been marked as subliterary, their travels cut across distinctions in readers’ class, gender, and location, much more readily than the “verses” and “sermons” with which they were intimately connected. Broadsides and broadside peddlers therefore illustrate some of the ways in which “poetry” in the nineteenth century was not a single, coherent category with stable social meanings but was instead a hodgepodge of genres, formats, and media that engaged readers in many different ways. Whittier and Emery may have treated the peddlers’ “varses” with irony, but they also greeted their appearance with delight. This ambivalence can stand for a larger cultural relation toward poems in early American culture, and it is embodied in the figure of the balladmonger, whose vagrant relation to social and generic hierarchies enabled him (and his poems) to remain in and out of literature, literary history, and literariness.

Balladmongers and peddlers are interesting, I will argue in this chapter, not merely because they now seem exotic to a literary history defined by major authors and prose genres. Their exoticness was historical, and the challenges they posed to literature and literariness helped to define those concepts in a period of transition. I present two case studies: Jonathan Plummer, who lived and wrote in eastern Massachusetts from the 1790s to the 1810s, and Thomas Shaw, a poet from southern Maine who was active from the 1770s to the 1830s. Plummer published more than fifty texts, including a long autobiography. Shaw, on the other hand, printed fewer than a dozen poems, but these represent only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre—around two thousand poems—almost all of which resides in manuscript books held at the Maine Historical Society. Both authors sold their poems on itinerant peddling circuits, although only Plummer depended on peddling for his livelihood, and their poetic itineraries took them through a variety of settings and institutions in the landscape of turn-of-the-century New England.

It is difficult to judge how unusual or how common these poets were. Certainly, there were other author-peddlers from the early 1800s, like Mason Locke Weems, an agent for the Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey who wrote many heroic biographies and invented the fable about George Washington and the cherry tree.¹² In various archives, I have found similar poets from later in the century, such as A. W. Harmon (1812–1901), who, like Plummer and Shaw, published poems about murders, accidents, and Indian wars, along with songs about his own miraculous conversion, and George Gordon Byron DeWolfe (1835–73), the self-titled “Steam Machine Poet” of Nashua, New Hampshire, who wrote poems on demand (often claiming speed-writing records) and distributed them in railway depots.¹³ Poets like Robert Dinsmoor (1757–1836), the “Rustic Bard” of New Hampshire, and George Moses Horton (1797–1883), the “Colored Bard of North Carolina,” were endowed with a similar aura of unlettered prolixity, especially because of their eccentric relations to print-based norms of literariness.¹⁴ And, of course, many poets wrote prolifically despite rarely (or never) seeing their work in print (Emily Dickinson is only the most famous of these and not at all atypical in her scribal practices).¹⁵ Part of what makes Plummer and Shaw exceptional is simply the size of the archives they left behind: the large number of poems they wrote and the lengthy memoirs they recorded. Peddler-poets may be entirely unexceptional features of the nineteenth-century literary field—but this would make them all the more compelling, given the received history of American poetry, which usually begins with internationally celebrated authors like William Cullen Bryant or Lydia Sigourney. The balladmongers’ ballads, in contrast, are interesting because of the challenges they pose to literary history and literary criticism. Although Shaw and Plummer occasionally pop up in critical accounts of early American poetry, their work has always been dismissed as self-evidently worthless. So while scholars are once again taking seriously the work of Bryant, Sigourney, Longfellow, and other popular nineteenth-century poets, poets like Plummer or Shaw belong only to the archive, not the canon. In this way, the twenty-first century agrees with the nineteenth; as my readings will show, the publicness of their performances as poets caused conflict in their own time. That is, while they wrote poems and were sometimes well liked, neither were “really” poets, even to their contemporaries. This ambivalence throws into relief the ways in which poetic genres, authorship, and literariness emerge from, and fold back into, broader debates about public order and social cohesion; part of the animus against balladmongers came from the threat they were believed to pose to all of these. Thus, the cases of Shaw and Plummer demonstrate how local culture in the early national period was characterized by multifaceted engagements with poems, and their histories present an opportunity to interrogate early nineteenth-century “poetry” as a set of texts, objects, practices, and institutions.

The Yankee Troubadour

Jonathan Plummer was born in 1761 in Newbury, Massachusetts, a town located about thirty-five miles north of Boston, near the mouth of the Merrimack River. He was the son of a cordwainer and, in his early childhood, displayed an unusual aptitude for reading and memorization. He briefly served in a militia during the Revolutionary War, took up peddling in the 1780s, and participated in several literary circles, although always as an interloper. In the 1790s, he began composing poems to sell among his other wares, and stories of his bizarre behavior, and possible mental illness or disability, began circulating along with his poems, pins, and tape. These stories were aided by two developments in Plummer’s life: his quest for patronage from the wealthy and eccentric merchant “Lord” Timothy Dexter and a religious awakening that prompted him to street preaching and millennial prophecy (like his contemporary Lorenzo Dow, he was also known for interrupting church services). After Dexter’s death in 1806, Plummer lived entirely on sales of his poems and other goods and actually accumulated a respectable estate. He was tolerated by town authorities and became a figure of fun, especially for his often-proclaimed (and always frustrated) desire to find a wife. He wrote, printed, and peddled his work continuously in and around Newburyport until his death in 1819.¹⁶

During his lifetime, Newburyport (which became a separate town three years after his birth) was an important trading and shipping post on the northern Atlantic seaboard, and Plummer’s career roughly fits the contour of the area’s economic rise and fall. The capture of Louisbourg in French Canada by New England forces in 1745 had ignited an upsurge of millennial enthusiasm throughout the region while also relieving coastal trade from the depredations of French privateers. The repeated forays of George Whitefield in and across the region during the second half of the eighteenth century helped to maintain a punctuated cycle of evangelical revivalism and economic speculation. By the time of Whitefield’s death—in Newburyport—in 1770, the town had become a regional center of shipbuilding and competed with Salem as the second-largest depot on the New England coast. Amid the imperial crisis and the onset of war, and particularly during the blockade of Boston, Newburyport was a base for piracy against British vessels, and a number of people in the town accumulated large fortunes from privateering. While many of these fortunes collapsed in the postwar economic depression, the revival of trade during the Federalist period brought wealth flowing back in, illustrated most spectacularly by the career of Plummer’s patron Dexter. Newburyport engaged primarily in the West Indies trade (one of the largest American rum distilleries was in town), but local commercial firms also maintained agents in England, Spain, Cape Verde, Brazil, Surinam, and Peru, situating the town in a circum-Atlantic constellation. Trade was flourishing enough in the 1790s that William Lloyd Garrison’s father, who had come to New Brunswick as an indentured servant, chose to settle there after working off his indentures. He thought Newburyport had better prospects than Boston; he was wrong. The town’s prosperity declined precipitously with the embargo of 1807, and a major fire in 1811 further checked commercial expansion. Economic growth would henceforth be seated further up the Merrimack, at the new mill towns of Lowell and Lawrence.¹⁷

Plummer’s work was imbued with the spirit of speculation and enthusiasm that characterized the era and the region, and despite his celebrated strangeness, his career aligns with the situation of the town. His poems generally focused on two kinds of topics, trade-related disasters (shipwrecks, fires, epidemics) and local scandals, usually involving the ministry. His texts were dotted with news from abroad gleaned from the town’s privileged position as an entrepôt of Atlantic trade, and they inclined toward millennial interpretations of events. The broadsides are difficult to categorize generically, because they often combined a prose account (always assuredly “factual”) with a “sermon” on the topic and one or two poems inspired by the same, tucked into the upper left or lower right corners of the sheet. Most included woodcuts at the header—standard black coffins for the most part but sometimes more elaborate designs. As in the case of “The Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” (1793), the sheet could strongly resemble a contemporary newspaper, and many seem intended to function in just that way, so referring to Plummer’s works as “poetry” is inexact.¹⁸

Beginning in the 1790s, Plummer hawked his broadsides and other goods and recited his poems at the base of Market Street, where most of the town’s printers and booksellers clustered. His recitations often garnered a crowd; a contemporary described him “having a voice strong, flexible, and euphonious,” although “spoiled by the affectation of being wonderfully pathetic.”¹⁹ He seems to have had working relationships with the printers in the neighborhood, because he was regularly able to get his work published. His bibliography totals more than fifty attributed items, at a time when booksellers’ catalogs featured few local authors and most broadsides were anonymous. Thus, his “authorship,” while eccentric to norms of literariness, was also exceptionally successful. His work usually appeared on the heels of some catastrophe, most accounts suggest it was popular, and this popularity tracked closely with the poems’ timeliness. “Plummer was wise enough to give only that which the occasion called forth, and never stereotyped or seldom published a second edition. He knew the signs of the times, and the tastes and habits of the public.”²⁰ But Plummer sold these timely texts in tandem with almanacs, captivity narratives and other pamphlets, steady-sellers such as “A Dialogue Between a Blind-Man and Death” and Robert Russel’s Seven Sermons, popular verses like “Father Abbey’s Will,” and also remainders of his own unsold works.²¹ This stock of new and old matter made a distinctive blend of the historical and the contemporary. Plummer’s broadsides could be purchased individually for 4½ pence or in bundles at “2s. and 8d. per Dozen,” so it is possible that other peddlers sold his poems in secondary markets.²² Whittier’s reminiscences show that Plummer traveled into the surrounding countryside to sell his goods (the Whittier farm was about 10 miles from Plummer’s base of operations), and Plummer claimed to have marketed his work in Boston and Salem as well. Several of his poems were reprinted in newspapers in Pittsfield, Newport, and Providence, each more than 100 miles from Newburyport.

Figure 1. Jonathan Plummer, “Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” (Newbury, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Although he contributed to almanacs and newspapers, the materiality of the broadside as the saleable item is crucial to the business of Plummer’s work. Broadsides were usually published as proclamations to be read aloud and posted or passed along to the next set of eyes, ears, and hands for further exchange through singing, recitation, and silent reading. This held true for all kinds of genres, from government announcements to ballads and elegies.²³ Observing from Salem, the minister William Bentley noted during a yellow fever epidemic that “Plummer, a droll fool, has published an elegy upon the sufferings at Newbury Port … & hawkes them with success.”²⁴ A broadside was cheap and easy to carry around, making it an ideal format for itinerant preachers, peddlers, and poets (all professions with which Plummer identified). Broadsides were therefore particularly adept at cultivating scandal, rumor, news, and prophecy, and the format drew from a long history of such associations: as one scholar of seventeenth-century New England puts it, a “discourse of sensationalism and immediacy [was attached] to the broadside format,” which derived from the “sensational stories of monstrous births, natural devastations, and unnatural deaths, as well as … the latest political and social developments” that were its stock-in-trade.²⁵ In addition, because Plummer’s broadsides were not identified with specific printers (the colophon most often read “printed for the author”), they could incorporate personal material about prominent community members without much risk of legal reprisal. Plummer loved to name names and reflect on the peccadillos of the pious: one title was “Hints to Elder Pottle,” prompted by rumors that “Elder Pottle has for a short time lately lived rather too much after the flesh”; another was “Parson Pidgin, or Holy Kissing…. Occasioned by a report, that Parson Pidgin had kissed a young woman.”²⁶ A third text, “Elegy On the death of the Rev. Mr. John Murray,” prompted Bentley to record angrily:

Was circulated here in the form of Ballads, &c. an Elegy & character of Murray of Newbury Port,—purporting to have been written by a Jonathan Plummer, in which by dogril verses & the curious character, the Hero of the piece is held up to contempt, & a strange curiosity excited to investigate all the exceptionable parts of every exceptionable character. It is not known here how many hands were concerned in it.²⁷

While it is difficult to verify Bentley’s suspicion that Plummer had financial backers sponsoring his “characters” of the ministry, his response does indicate how Plummer’s marginal position gave his work a subversive edge.²⁸ Much like the libels that Robert Darnton has excavated from the ancien régime, Plummer’s “dogril verses” excited “strange curiosity” into the characters of prominent men by virtue of their markedly subliterate form, “Ballads, &c.,” which in Bentley’s reference seems to mark both a genre and a format.²⁹ This subliterariness feeds the text’s capacity to move around with a mysterious agency (it “was circulated” by unknown hands), spreading contempt and “strange curiosity” “to investigate all the exceptionable parts of every exceptionable character” by way of the gossip, slander, lies, news, and facts the sheet retells. Ironically, the vagrant retelling of gossip and slander sometimes ensnared Plummer, too: “A lie having got into circulation, concerning Jonathan Plummer, the pedlar, and poet, much like the following one, viz. ‘He’s an Hermaphrodite,’ this may certify, that I being a physician, have inspect [sic] the said Plummer, and found him to be wholly and properly a man”; of course, he attempted to contain this lie with yet another wayward broadside.³⁰ Plummer’s peculiar relation to his texts and his readership comes from his being outside the standard of legitimate authorship or literariness. Neither printers nor booksellers nor authors served as the means of dissemination for poems like these; only “dogril verses” could move this way, and only a vagrant balladmonger could so move them.

Peddling and hawking—defined by itinerancy, salesmanship, the materiality of printing, and charges of scandal or the illicit—were important structuring principles for all Plummer’s published work. He was always on the move (he characterized himself as “a great traveler, and rarely to be found two days together, in one house”), meeting new people and exchanging tales, songs, sermons, and news with them.³¹ The sociability of peddling is at least as important as its material or economic features for understanding the cultural import of Plummer’s “Ballads, &c.” According to his autobiography, Plummer’s poetic ambitions did not originate from peddling, nor was peddling the only outlet for his poems. Despite the low status of his occupations (which included “acting the pedagouger,” “repeating select passages from authors, selling hol-ibut, sawing wood, selling books, ballads, and fruit in the streets, serving as a porter and post-boy, filling beds with straw, and wheeling them to the owners thereof, [and] collecting rags”), and despite having no formal education, Plummer managed to read extensively among authors like “Shakespear, Fielding, Juvenal, Dryden, Swift, Smallet, Stern, De Corvantes,” as well as the poems of Pope and Gay and the “tuneful works” of Allan Ramsey, which so “ravished my soul with such transporting joys” that “[I] soon attempted to write in poetry myself, and not without success.”³² As he gives it, he was grounded in the best authors of civility and politeness, a far cry from the rudeness of his own later work, and the primary value of this reading was the opportunity that it offered for sociable encounters, since he gained access to these authors through the private libraries of men and women of learning in the area. Reading was an occasion for conversation, and Plummer’s earliest poems fit a milieu of polite exchange among intimate acquaintances.

The experience of poetry as a mode of socialization was common for turn-of-the-century Newburyport readers, who had access to the most current English and European Romantic poets, as well as revered classics like the works of Milton, Watts, Thomson, Cowper, and Pope. Newburyport’s Social Library, founded in 1794, provided patrons an “easy method to obtain” “useful valuable works” like Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), a poem that Margaret Searle, a young resident of the town, reread in 1809 “with renewed delight—I began it to Grandmother but it interested her so much she would not let me go on with it, she did not she said see the advantage of having one’s feelings so worked up for nothing…. I think this is a flower in Walter Scotts cap.”³³ Searle read contemporary poems like Southey’s “After Blenheim” (1796), Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), among many others, usually in a setting characterized by group reading and the exchange of books among friends.³⁴ Her reading history supports David S. Shields’s account of the improving effects granted to certain kinds of poems in a culture of civility and refinement.³⁵

In her voluminous letters and diaries, Searle never mentions Plummer, although the two lived close by, and as a single woman, she was an example of the “sisters of the skies” over whom Plummer often rhapsodized in print. For women like Searle, he composed poems such as the Ovidian satire on “L.L.—transformed to a two quart bottle” and thematic allegories like “Self-Conceit,” which he recited for female acquaintances or exchanged through letters.³⁶ This grounding in polite sociability is the unexpected genesis of Plummer’s mendicant, considerably less polite balladry. With some (apparently) successful poems under his belt, in the early 1790s, he began printing poems for sale. These addressed topics of national and international concern, such as a poem to George Washington printed in a local almanac; a broadside on the Haitian Revolution that included an extended narrative of the rebellion and a long poem addressed to white refugees, some of whom had resettled in Newburyport; and a broadside poem deploring the execution of Louis XVI, which he wrote “at the Request of many true Republicans” in an archly Federalist town that had tolled church bells to mourn the occasion.³⁷

Plummer quickly gained a sense of his market: “I had found that serious writings commonly went off faster than others. I had published merry works of my own, and found them rather unsaleable. I had hypocritically composed elegy’s, &c. and sold them very fast.”³⁸ Unlike the poems written for limited circulation among the educated ladies and men he knew, these broadsides offered sensational and melodramatic accounts of ongoing or recent events and were related much more closely to newspapers and pamphlets than to classical or neoclassical literary models like the poems of Pope, Dryden, or Ramsay (as we have seen, many even looked like newspapers).

But if Plummer’s choices of topic and style reflected his desire to write poems saleable in the local market, this market orientation only partly explains his subsequent career. In the mid-1790s, Plummer began addressing poems to Timothy Dexter, an eccentric leather-dresser who had made a fortune in trade and had become, by the 1790s, one of the town’s most notorious citizens. In 1793, Plummer published a note of congratulations to Dexter on his fortune, and Dexter rewarded Plummer with a new suit consisting of “a long, black, frock coat, with stars on the collar, and also at the front corners; this livery also was fringed, where fringes could be put; a black under dress, shoes and large buckles, with a large cocked hat, and a gold-headed cane.”³⁹ Plummer hereafter named himself “Poet Laureate” to “Lord Dexter,” declaring, “I am, my Lord, in frost or summer, / Your Poet Laureat, Jon’than Plummer.”⁴⁰ Despite the fact that he purveyed news and other goods, this claim to being a poet laureate in the equipage of Lord Dexter gave Plummer a much more antiquated role in the community, one that enabled a richly ironic contrast between the pseudo-aristocratic styling of his vocation and the genres of his verses.⁴¹

Figure 2. Jonathan Plummer, “The Tragedy of Louis Capet” (Newburyport, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

His addresses to Dexter, most of which were published in newspapers, accordingly called upon a pastoral register similar to that of his coterie poems and quite different from the sensationalized, reportorial language of his broadsides (although this poem, too, details the news of Dexter’s recent return to town).

Your lordship’s welcome back again—

Fair nymphs, with sighs, have mourn’d your staying

So long from them and me your swain,

And wonder’d at such long delaying:

But now you bless again our eyes;

Our melting sorrow droops and dies.⁴²

During the period of this “laureateship,” Plummer began to have prophetic dreams in which a voice announced to him, in verse, his fortune and the fates of those around him. These dreams prompted a religious conversion, and his poems from this point forward adopted the language of providential utterance, using disasters and catastrophes—“terrible accidents, drownings, suicides, and hangings,” in the words of one contemporary—as evidence of the wondrous interventions of God into human affairs and as a pretext to exhort audiences to repent while they still had time.⁴³ Plummer’s “Elegy on the death of His Excellency Sir TIMOTHY DEXTER” combined several of the genres in which Plummer’s broadsides circulated. The elegy begins venally enough, with Plummer lamenting Dexter’s death as a loss of patronage: “Of this kind patron, I’m bereft, / He’s all his cash, and poet left.”⁴⁴ Yet rather than aligning himself with Dexter’s fame, wealth, or position or casting his elegy as the security for Dexter’s future renown, Plummer takes Dexter’s death as an occasion to call all unrepentant sinners to account:

Figure 3. Jonathan Plummer, poet laureate to Lord Dexter. Illustration from Samuel L. Knapp, Life of Lord Timothy Dexter (Newburyport: John G. Tilton, 1852).

O let us solemn warning take,

And all our sins at once forsake,

Rememb’ring that’twill soon be said,

Of all of us, that we are dead!

Rememb’ring that quite soon we must,

Be mouldering into loathsome dust!

Ah! on this earthly, weeping shore,

My patron, Dexter, lives no more!⁴⁵

The poem eschews the conventional maneuvers of neoclassical elegy and instead adopts the hortatory tone of millennial religion. The “Sketch of the character of LORD DEXTER” clarifies Plummer’s position: “by the kindness of God [Dexter] was generally a very triumphant conquerer; but in regard to the main business that he was sent into the world to transact I cannot positively say how it was with my deceased friend. I must confess that though I have hopes of him through the kindness of God, I am not without fears.”⁴⁶ Fealty to his Lordship was no longer enough to blind Plummer to the more pressing needs of his calling:

This I do know courteous reader, that you & I will shortly follow the generous Dexter through the dark valley of the shadow of death, and appear before the judgment seat of Christ, at the judgment day, to be judged according to the deeds done in the body, whether they have been good, or whether they have been evil…. It may therefore be proper for us, while we indulge ourselves in proper reflections concerning the departed Dexter, to be very careful to consider our own ways.⁴⁷

Not surprisingly, Plummer identified himself on this sheet as “a travelling preacher, & poet lauret to his Lordship,” and itinerancy thereafter defined his stance toward the public. In later broadsides, he titled himself, among other things, “a traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader,” “an independent traveling preacher,” “a lay Bishop extraordinary; and a traveling preacher, Physician, Poet, and Trader,” and “a latter-day Prophet, Lay-Bishop, traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader.”⁴⁸ Yet while Plummer’s poems trafficked in cosmic revelations and global exhortations to repent, his subjects stayed local and timely, so that these later broadsides remained generically linked to news, scandal, and rumor, even while they also adopted the styles and modes of sermons, exegesis, and disputation. For instance, “Dreadful Fire at Portsmouth!” (1814) concerned many things, including

a great, and dreadful fire at Portsmouth (N. H.) that began to consume houses on the evening of the 22d of December, 1813. About 180 buildings, it is thought were burned. On the deaths of about 200 American and British soldiers, marines and sailors, and about 535 Creek Indians, killed lately in various battles. On the deaths of Captain Manour, and another man drowned in the Merrimack, and of Capt. John Brockway of Newburyport, Capt. Lambert and one Woodbury of Salem, Peter Queening, probably of Gloucester, one Nye of Hallowel, and 11 others belonging probably to Fish-island, in New York, drowned in or near the Atlantic Ocean. On the deaths of about 20 people who have died lately of the spotted fever in Vermont, and Newhampshire: on the death of one Norris, one Ring, and a young woman named Hovey of Hallowell, who lately perished in, or near the Atlantic: and on the deaths of one Smiley, who it is said cut his throat at Newington (N. H.) and one Phippes and a woman named Nichols, who it is supposed have killed themselves at Salem.⁴⁹

The broadside collated local news items (the fire at Portsmouth), more personal local tragedies (the various suicides and deaths at sea), and also international dispatches from the ongoing war with Britain, including a lurid description of the massacre at Fort Mims, Alabama, which had taken place the year before. These tragedies and disasters all revealed divine providence:

Almighty Father! Potent God!

How awful is thy chast’ning rod;

When wicked men are lifted high,

And swords are drawn, and bullets fly,

And sins provoke thy potent hand,

To put destruction in a land,

And make proud sinners hopes expire,

By shewing of thy dreadful ire!⁵⁰

The sermonic aspects of the poem and the narrative worked in tandem with their sensational features—this broadside also resembles a tabloid with a banner headline—to produce the idiom of latter-day prophecy that imbues the sheet as a whole. However, it is not the case that the lurid details satisfied one set of readerly desires, while the sermon and its providential interpretations satisfied another, higher set of desires; nor did the lurid details attract readers simply so that the providential interpretation could then moralize them. Instead, the work of divination—revealing the providential motive behind such a random assemblage of events—drove the dissemination and market orientation of the sheet just as much as did the shocking details and gruesome descriptions. As Plummer explains,

Being sent, courteous reader, through the surprizing grace of the loveliest of the lovely to preach and write concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation, I have found a great plenty of business, and although I have yet preached but little, I have found many of my works in print, very saleable indeed, insomuch that there seems to be much room to hope that my fickle efforts in that way have served by the blessing of king Jesus, to edify, comfort, and instruct many of the sons of men, and the daughters of women.⁵¹

The outlandish ambition of this self-description only partially overshadows the interesting theory of the market that it lays out: when Plummer states, “I have found a great plenty of business,” he implies both that he has preached and written often “concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation” and also that he has discovered numerous occasions for preaching and writing (i.e., many scandals, atrocities, and tragedies to print for a desiring public). The work of sermonizing, in other words, becomes the basis for collating various items about drownings, hangings, and the like. Tragedies and atrocities are not only instances of divine providence; rather, providential interpretation is also the pretext for spreading news about death, disease, and disorder. Thus, the genres of sermon and scandal work together to create Plummer’s “business” in the broadsides that he hawks and preaches.

With vagrancy its modus operandi, such poems dwelt beneath the domain of legitimate literature, and therefore, like slander or gossip, they could propagate themselves far beyond the control of truth, authority, or legitimate culture. It is worth remembering that itinerancy was one of the most controversial aspects of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakening, and in many eighteenth-century polemics on religion, itinerant preachers were often scathingly contrasted with the settled pastorate. Adopting a title like “an independent traveling preacher” therefore carried distinct implications for contemporary norms of public order. Similarly, the vagrancy of the peddler’s work, I think, accounts for the ambivalence and hostility directed against it, which surfaces most pointedly in the frequent references made about his “ballads.” Such references are surprising, since he never wrote any. All the descriptions that exist of Plummer speak of him as though he wrote, sang, and sold ballads, even though he never titled any of his texts as a “ballad” (so far as I have discovered), and though none of his poems resemble ballads in any formal sense. Samuel L. Knapp, a writer and lawyer in Newburyport in the first half of the nineteenth century, concluded that Plummer “grew up among fishermen, clam diggers, and lobster catchers, yet his works were read by thousands…. The ballad maker and death’s head vender grew rich on the sale of his trash.”⁵² The ballad here marks a social class rather than a genre or form: designating Plummer a “ballad maker” signaled his ability to reach thousands of readers, made a normative distinction about the worthlessness of his poems and those who read them, and tied him and his work to a form of production only indirectly under the control of legitimating forces. Worthier writers, Knapp suggests, went ignored, while ballad makers grew rich selling their trash to the unwashed. Another memorial to Plummer, written by Redford Webster (brother of the novelist Hannah Foster), made a similar case:

Now there was a man named Plummer, and he was numbered among the bards of Essex…. And he traveled from place to place, holding converse with the wayfaring man and stranger, gathering accounts of strange accidents that befell them by flood and fire; likewise of all great or singular men and women…. And, like the minstrels of old, he sat in the chimney corner and recited to an admiring audience the adventures he had heard or witnessed; and he wove them into ballads that circulated with great rapidity. And when he walked forth, the farmers rested upon their hoe-handles to listen to his marvelous tales, or to his astonishing fluency of song; and when he ended, loaded his bags and pockets with the ripe product of their fields; as Homer of old was rewarded by the Cossite dames, after singing his Iliad to their listening children, with a trencher of figs and a cup of mulled wine.⁵³

This memorial placed Plummer even more firmly in an archaic register, as one “numbered among the bards,” “like the minstrels of old,” or “as Homer of old,” despite the fact that Plummer “visited the University … frequented the markets and fairs, attended camp-meetings and commencements, and had sojourned in every place of public resort.”⁵⁴ As a figure of antiquity, moving among the spaces of contemporary life in America, Plummer seemed, for this author, to endanger national culture. The vagrant represented not only the irruption of the antique into the modern; his itinerancy also threatened to inculcate popular disregard for legitimate public culture. Because “the song and the ballad will be remembered while there are natural feelings, and a sensibility to simplicity of expression,” this memorial concluded, “Let us not therefore any longer leave the composition of songs and ballads, to the journeymen of the Pedlar. For lo! he no longer keepeth in a corner, but under the eye, and even under the license of the police; he spreadeth out his verses, and his tales, full of superstition, of horror, of immorality; thus corrupting the innocent youth, and confirming the abandoned.”⁵⁵

The passage, with all its pointed irony, betrays significant worry about the prospect of an unrestrained, popular culture of “songs and ballads” that fails to remain “in a corner” but instead brings its tales “full of superstition, of horror, of immorality” out into the open. Like a slanderous broadside—the chief virtue of which, according to W. C. Ford, was its “quiet circulation, difficult to counter or trace to its source”—the kind of poetry Plummer embodied appeared to propagate itself easily and endlessly (he wove “ballads that circulated with great rapidity”), thereby imperiling social decorum and good taste (in a historical irony, Webster’s son John would later be the defendant in one of the most infamous and sensational murder trials of the nineteenth century, a crime straight out of a Plummer broadside).⁵⁶ In the face of the local, decentralized, ephemeral, and vagrant features of this poetics, a more elite stance toward culture projected the language and emblems of an imagined antiquity onto writers like Plummer. This move defined local poetry as a residual formation, one that did not merit inclusion in any narrative of American literature. By placing such poetry, and the system of relations it engendered, under the domain of “the ballad,” interpreters arrogated to themselves the power to arbitrate literary history, because to locate such work under the name of “the ballad” was to define retroactively the values and meanings of the culture in which that poetry had mattered. The hybridity of ballads—always already antique, printed, and yet oral objects of elite interest yet folk forms as well, and, most important, ubiquitous yet fated imminently to disappear—ably represents the fictions of a conflicted literary history, because the figure of “the ballad” could incorporate the material that the literary defined as other than itself.⁵⁷ The unlicensed circulation of poems under the sign of “the ballad” thus gives rise, at the turn of the century, to a more restrictive sense of the poet’s relation to public order, and the balladmonger helps to make manifest an incipient sense of literariness, as a second instance illustrates.

The Down-East Homer

Thomas Shaw is sometimes called (usually with tongue in cheek) Maine’s first poet.⁵⁸ Shaw was born in 1753, near Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. When he was about ten years old, his family moved to the Maine territory (then part of the Massachusetts colony), where they helped establish a settlement project (Pearsontown, later renamed Standish) on the Saco River northwest of Portland. His father Ebenezer ran the settlement’s sawmill, and he built the second frame house in the area, where Thomas would live the rest of his life. Thomas served in the Revolutionary War, fighting in the siege of Boston, and sometime during his military service he began writing poems. He returned to Maine in the late 1770s, carried on the family’s farm and mill, held a number of minor offices in Standish, and died there in 1838. During his life, Shaw published around ten poems (that I have found), which were printed as broadsides, except for one published as an eight-page pamphlet. These poems focus on local tragedies (shipwrecks, executions, and accidental deaths) and national events (the Peace of Ghent; Lafayette’s visit in 1825), and they circulated widely, with at least one reprinted in New York City. Shaw’s print bibliography is, however, only a tiny fraction of his output: he wrote somewhere around two thousand poems, which he transcribed repeatedly, over many decades, in a series of voluminous manuscripts and homemade books. His reputation as a local balladmonger (the “Down-East Homer,” as an early twentieth-century historian called him) probably derived from both his published and unpublished work.

Although he has been accorded a minor place in the history of a minor region, his career has usually provided literary criticism a means to mark the difficulties that stood in the way of any aspiring poet in the early national period: “His verse was indeed ‘unlernt,’ lamentably bad, worthless today, except that it indicates the isolation of mind and poverty of vision that was inevitable in those days of material and political struggle.”⁵⁹ Where it has been noted at all, the archive left by a poet like Shaw is treated as a forlorn hope, and an amused condescension has been the standard critical approach to it. However, Shaw’s manuscripts speak to the conditions of early nineteenth-century poetic culture with a different sort of eloquence: Shaw is interesting precisely because he was not a mute, inglorious Milton but was instead all too profuse and prolix. If his poems forestall a critical analysis predicated on the conditions of literariness abstracted from print textuality, their seemingly self-evident worthlessness is also anticipated throughout his writings, which meditate obsessively on the conditions of their own mediation. The interplay between media in his archive, and between media and his archive, offers a compelling opportunity to imagine the social being of poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Shaw described the region where he grew up as “the wilderness, where there was no schools nor meeting untill I was 15 years old. Now my parents lernt me, as well as the rest of his Children to read, and I never went to school a moment in my life.”⁶⁰ Shaw’s ambivalent relation to literacy and print literature—he could read and write, yet regularly characterized himself as “an old foole / That never once did go to school”—serves as an organizing principle for both his massive poetic output and the marginal position of his poems in relation to the literary culture of his time and after.⁶¹ The ways in which the borders of the poetic were policed at the turn of the century was a regular topic in his writings. When he was thirty-two, Shaw wrote a warrant for his own arrest:

Whereas Thomas Shaw, of Pearsontown in the County of Cumberland & Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Poet, did, on the twenty seventh Day of March, Anno Domini, one thousand, seven hundred & Eighty five, maliciously and of malice propense, commit a most horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses—Guardians of the liberal Arts, These are to command you by virtue of a power to me granted, from the high Court of Apollo, to apprehend the Body of the said Thomas, & him safely keep, so that he be had before the said Court aforesaid, on or before the twenty first Day of May next. Thereof fail not, ______Anno 1786 Mercury⁶²

The delightful self-deprecation of this moment indicates a wry awareness of the conditions of writing in rural North America just after the close of the American Revolution. While the warrant would indict Thomas Shaw, Poet, for the temerity of writing and writing badly—his crime is both trespass and murder—writing the warrant reveals a self-conscious literariness that the warrant’s intention would deny. If the “Guardians of the liberal Arts” keep out those interlopers not vested with power “from the high Court of Apollo”—here the defendant seems to walk both sides of the line—the familiarity with legalese (“maliciously and of malice propense”) and classical mythology shows a knowledge of writing’s discursive power, making the “horrid, barbarous and inhuman murder, on the Bodies of the Muses” look a bit like an inside job. Shaw’s warrant therefore seems contradictory, because it indicates someone capable of judging his own work critically and of anticipating critical judgment. Though forbidden to enter “the high Court of Apollo,” he knows the way in.

This warrant both is and is not prescient regarding Shaw’s poetic career. All his life, he struggled for public recognition as a poet, but despite his continual efforts, only a handful of his poems were ever printed. While these were quite popular (a young Nathaniel Hawthorne was one enthusiastic reader), such publications did not win him deference as an author but instead engendered their own forms of punitive discipline.⁶³ Yet the sheer size of his archive belies his frustrations getting into print. As he noted late in life on the flyleaf to one of his daybooks, “I Have been a writing 60 years and my books and papers lie very loose under my hands and are now very many.”⁶⁴ Or, as he put it in “Thomas Shaws Wrtings. Colected from his Manuscripts &c. The interduction to what followes”:

Here in this volom you may see

My Songs both old and new to be

Sience Seventeen hundread Seventy five

I wrote them all I do beleve

I have colected them and here

Many of them here doth appear

Untill there pile here may be high

That have my thoughts in them to lie

In Sixty years I have wrote down

Many a thought out of my crown

And now to vew them my week mind

Hardly there meaning all may find

A thought has led me to begin

To write them all over agin

The good and preshous here to land

And all the bad fling from my hand.⁶⁵

The poem introduces Shaw’s effort to collate and revise his work by collecting clean copies of his poems together in one book. Copying is never a neutral act: it was one of the central practices of contemporary pedagogy, so Shaw thus engages (or imitates) the work of the schooling he had been denied as a young man.⁶⁶ But whereas a student of the early 1800s would copy texts primarily from a canon of approved Christian piety, Shaw copies his own (albeit often pious) poems. “To write them all over agin” is a self-canonizing process that enters in “the good and preshous” poems while flinging away “all the bad”: “good” and “bad” may be both moral and aesthetic terms here, and the act of distinguishing blends both kinds of judgment. Rewriting involves copying over his poems, which then rewrites the terms of his authorship by condensing the poetry into a single “volom”: Shaw reviews his sixty-year poetic career by invoking and remediating the materiality of that career, such that rewriting proliferates the poems while at the same time rendering their materiality invisible. Imagined first as scattered sheets, the poems “doth appear / Untill there pile here may be high,” but rewriting consolidates the pile into a book, making poems into spaces for “my thoughts … to lie.” Similarly, “a thought” occasions Shaw’s act of rewriting and the critical distinction that guards inclusion in the “volom.” Thoughts precede and succeed poems, which become no more than the vessels for “many a thought out of my crown.” Of course, the sheer labor of so much rewriting (the manuscript book is more than two hundred pages long) spectacularly contradicts this logic of effacement. But the manuscript’s handwritten-ness is itself obscured by a thematic of printing that organizes this project. The book’s title, “Thomas Shaws Wrtings. Colected from his Manuscripts,” separates “Writings” from “Manuscripts,” implying that the collection is something other than what it is—another manuscript. And, what is more, Shaw incorporates the structures of print into this book by supplying many of the organizational supports of the printed codex, including a table of contents, page numbers, and index meticulously written out. As poems reveal thoughts by disguising the labor of their own reproduction, the laboriously transcribed manuscript cloaks handwriting in the approximation of print.

Figure 4. Table of contents from one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.

Shaw’s scribal practice approaches—or, supplements—conventions of the printing he could not reliably access. His journals regularly detail frustrations regarding a newspaper, the Maine Wesleyan Journal, which, although it often printed requests for submissions, apparently refused or ignored his contributions. Several of Shaw’s manuscript books have hand-sewn covers made from sheets of the local newspapers, one of which includes a poem. By folding his poems and other writings into newsprint sheets, Shaw places his work “in” the newspaper in a way that the newspaper’s editors would not. This minor effort to correct his exclusion from print publication is echoed within some of these books, where Shaw wrote out lengthy “letters to the Editor of the Maine Wesleyan Journal” on topics such as the playing of instrumental music in church (a favorite bugbear of his, on which the newspaper printed a short series of opinion pieces in 1834). On one occasion, the newspaper’s editor appears to have responded publicly to Shaw’s many submissions:

Figure 5. Index to one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.

Figure 6. Back cover of one of Thomas Shaw’s manuscript poetry books, sewn from a leaf of the Cumberland Gazette (July 1786). Note the poem in the left-hand column. Collections of the Maine Historical Society.

We wish to speak plainly on another subject without reference to any person or article. We have seen long pieces of composition called extempore poetry, said to have been written by a boy or girl, as the case might have been, not indeed for publication, but probably for the want of better employment; now we beg that our good friends will be sparing of such articles, as we feel incompetent to decide on their merits, and still more reluctant to fill up the Journal with articles which, however interesting they may appear at home, ought never to be sent abroad. To write poetry, requires something more than an ability to write lines of equal length, ending with a similar sound.⁶⁷

There is no evidence that this statement was directed toward Shaw specifically. But regardless of who submitted the unpublishable poems, the editor’s critical standard speaks to the conflicts over mediation and canonization that partially structure Shaw’s poetics. What counts as “poetry” in antebellum Maine? Here, poetry and printedness have an intimate, if underarticulated relationship. Rhyme and meter do not by themselves make language into a poem; writing “poetry” requires at least the intention of print publication in order to be something more than mere “want of better employment” and thereby merit critical distinction (“we feel incompetent to decide on [the] merits” of the poems in question, which “might have been [written] not indeed for publication”). These are standards Shaw seems to have internalized within his own unpublished (if not unpublishable) poems:

Messieurs Printers if people would me hear

I would send you something that is very fare

Now your custemor a year I have been

And as for your press I dare not enter in

Prehaps sum people will call me a poet

But my lerning will not let me shoe it

Because to be a poet if I shout begin

It is your press I cannot enter in

And What if I should go on for to shoe

How fare a lernt man before can go

But if I should beet your lernt man agin

It is your press I cannot enter in …

If I had the lerning of sum lernt man

To put me in your press twould be your plan

But to lern now is to late to begin

Therefore it is your press I cannot enter in

For a man of no lerning to think to write

To fill your gazette does not you delight

So he had beter never think to begin

Because your press he cannot enter in

For a man that never did go to scool

To write for your press I think he is a fool

Now to write for you he beter not begin

For it your press he will not enter in

I do not want a lernt man to shoe to me

How a poeteckile stanze should formed be

But other lerning is to late to begin

For which your press I cannot enter in

For an unlarnt man to think to write for the

He beter not begin no no not he

For if he does people at him will grin

For your press he beter not enter in …

Now such a lernt man Sirs I can beat

Although he can spell and write very neat

Now to beat him I cannot now begin

Because your press I cannot enter in

Now such a lernt man I dare to defy

For to beet me a writing poetry

And if your press I could enter in

To bet such a one I would then begin.⁶⁸

This manuscript poem poses a series of challenges structured by a set of associations between learning, poetry, and the press. Shaw emphasizes his own lack of learning to explain his exclusion from the press (“If I had the lerning of sum lernt man / To put me in your press twould be your plan … For a man of no lerning to think to write / To fill your gazette does not you delight”), but in deferring to the exclusivity of print, Shaw defies the link between poetry and printedness, as well as poetry and learning. Only the learned may get into print, but “I do not want a lernt man to shoe to me / How a poeteckile stanze should formed be.” Thus, although “sum people will call me a poet / But my lerning will not let me shoe it,” Shaw refuses to let the learned—those in print and those who control the press—entirely appropriate the claim to poetry: “Now such a lernt man I dare to defy / For to beet me a writing poetry.” To be a poet is to be in print—Shaw is excluded from the press, not his work. But Shaw’s failure to get into print becomes the occasion to write even more poems, thereby magnifying both his exclusion from poetry and his claim to the title of poet.

Despite the frustrations expressed in poems like “Messieurs Printers,” Shaw did sometimes get published, although this success not only required substantial efforts on his part but also provoked occasional reprisals from his audiences. Shaw’s most popular effort was “A Mournful Song, on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. NATHANIEL KNIGHTS” (1807), which was printed in at least three editions in Portland and reprinted in New York. In his diary, Shaw described “the solemn news” of the drowning, noting in an incidental rhyme how Mrs. Knight “To god only she could then cry, When that she knew that she must die.” He then wrote out the text of his poem, copying from the broadside he had printed shortly after the accident occurred. According to his journal, he had composed the poem on February 23, 1807, the day after the tragedy.

This after noon I composed the above Mournfull song on the death of the Wife, and child of Nathaniel Night of Windham, and read it after meeting, and a Coppy was requested and I returned home late at night a praising god for his good ness to me. Thursday 26 we had a meeting at the Widdow Stuarts, and Brother Lumbard preached from those words, And I heard a voice saying unto me, arise, for blessed are the dead that die in the lord, &c. and Miss ford, and Brother Sar. Shaw, and Brother Aims exorted, and we had a powerfull meeting indeed, now this night two copies was requested of me, and Brother Lumbard had one for to read to parent of the child that was drowned Wife not found.⁶⁹

Shaw drew inspiration from both the tragedy itself (which was a major news story, remembered for decades afterward) and the exhortations of the Methodist meeting, which took the tragedy as one of its texts. Shaw read his verses aloud at meetings and then transcribed them on the request of fellow members. Knowledge of the poem spread in the first days, and Shaw wrote out additional copies, one of which was intended for Nathaniel Knight himself. The song began circulating orally and in manuscript through the close circle of the Methodist meeting (which convened in private homes, rather than a church), and while interested readers initially turned to Shaw himself, Brother Lumbard’s example indicates that readers soon began reciting it in settings where Shaw was not present. As news of the accident spread, Shaw realized the song’s potential popularity:

The above mournfull song was wrote the next day after the awfall sean happened, and it the first edition was was [sic] printed the fourth day of March, 10 days after the sean in 1807. Now I had 1444 pamphlets printed and there was such rapped sail for them, that another man took my workes without my leave within five days and printed at five hundred coppies for sail. And then I had a second edition printed the 18th of march; now I had three thousand copies printed at this time, and there is rappid sail for them, both east, and west.⁷⁰

If we take this account at its word, it offers an unusually specific record of the production of a broadside poem at the beginning of the nineteenth century.⁷¹ The poem appears in forty quatrain stanzas, divided in two columns and headed with a brief account of the tragedy and a woodcut of two coffins; the broadside looks crude even by the standard of its day. The price listed on the sheet was 6½ cents per copy, or 62½ cents per dozen. The bundle pricing indicates that Shaw or the printer anticipated a market for secondary circulation; in a port city like Portland, sailors or passengers on outbound ships might have carried copies very far indeed (this is the likeliest way that the song reached New York, where it was printed in a different broadside format later that year). Shaw claims that he sold “30 dollars worth” (about 460 copies, going by the face value of the broadside) in the three days after the first edition of the song was printed.⁷² Later, he “let Josiah Jarmon have 21 one duzon of the watch night songs for four dollars,” and he sold copies after various Methodist meetings in the area south of Portland.⁷³ Shaw was intimately involved with each stage of a process that took the “Mournful Song” from manuscript to recitation to printed broadside to recitation once again and back into scribal transcription.⁷⁴ The song’s mournful timeliness occasioned a “rappid sail,” which in turn prompted a dispute over ownership: the song quickly slipped beyond Shaw’s control, and in a supplemental stanza inserted at the bottom of the second edition of the broadside, he complained, “Take notice good people of Portland fair town, / I think I’m impos’d on by Printer MC KOWN: / He’s taken my verses and printed the same, / Which I think you’ll agree is much to his shame.”⁷⁵ This address to readers indicates the complex ways in which familiarity and anonymity were encoded in print. Shaw seeks to shame the printer for taking “my verses and [printing] the same,” by proclaiming himself as the verses’ rightful owner and mobilizing readers’ assent to this claim. But this appeal, and the attendant identification of the verses with Shaw, depends on the same diffuse, anonymous transmission that enables McKown to co-opt them in the first place. Elsewhere, Shaw lamented the barriers keeping his work (and himself) out of print; here the problem is reversed, as he finds himself in print against his will. The dynamics of print circulation destabilize the status of “poet,” keeping it perpetually in transit, along with the recitations, manuscripts, and broadsides moving around the region, and the author following in their wake, trying—unsuccessfully—to control them.

Figure 7. Thomas Shaw, “A Mournful Song on the Death of the Wife and Child of Mr. Nathaniel Knights” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

The year 1807 seems to have been a bad one for travel over water and, consequently, a good year for Shaw’s poetry; his poem “Melancholy Shipwreck,” written after the schooner Charles ran aground at the mouth of Portland harbor (killing sixteen people), proved as popular as his poem on the Knight family tragedy.

[As] I was riding to Portland, I heard the Melencoly news of Capten Adams Shiprack on Richmend Iland, and began a Moun-full song on the accashen. I wrote 9 verces on the rode, and finisht the same in Portland…. I comited my song to the press, and have reached home the third day. The next Saturday I rode to Portland saw to the fixing of the tipe for printing the Shipwreck song, and staid to quarterly meeting on the Saboth & herd Elder Breal, and Brother Wintch preach, and attended the Sacrement there, on monday I took out my Songs and spread them about, which met with great approbation, and returned home at night.⁷⁶

Figure 8. Thomas Shaw, “Melancholy Shipwreck” (Portland, 1807). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

This broadside was dated July 14, 1807, two days after the accident. This timeliness outcompeted the newspapers, and one of the poem’s primary functions was to convey information about the disaster; a postscript appended to the bottom of the sheet (probably of a later impression) included the names of the drowned, as well as information about the rescue of six surviving passengers. The poem itself works as a news report of the event, a providential interpretation of it, and also a meditation on the social work of poems in communicating information and forming communities. It begins by invoking a collective audience in the service of collective mourning:

Come let us weep with those that weep,

For their lost friends, plung’d in the deep;

And let us all now take some part

In grief which breaks the tender heart.⁷⁷

Reading the poem (or attending a recitation of it) establishes the medium of a social emotion, communal grief. The news of the accident therefore works within a moral paradigm:

O God! who know’st the wants of men,

Direct my mind, and guide my pen,

That I may bring the truth to light,

On this dread scene, and awful night.⁷⁸

Elaborating the news of the accident serves as a means to reveal God’s power (“my dear friends pray eye the rod, / And know’tis from a holy God”) while also calling for consolation (“Good Lord send cheering comfort down / To those who mourn in Portland town”), but these revelations and consolations come specifically through the dissemination of the poem. In other words, events do not interpret or reveal themselves but must be revealed through the inspiration, production, circulation, and consumption of poems.

Thus I have some few truths here told

The whole I cannot now unfold;

But if occasion e’er doth call,

The world at large shall have it all.

And now good people I must close

This solemn scene that since arose.

Then take the truth in this my song,

And overlook where I am wrong.⁷⁹

The concluding disclaimer shifts responsibility to the reader, who ultimately must filter the poem’s truths from its errors (a standard trope in disaster poems like this). In the context of the poem’s exchanges through recitation and the dissemination of printed or handwritten copies, this conclusion also links poet and reader in a community grounded in the work of poetry. The broadside thereby offers an occasion for audiences to reflect on the occasion that brings them together, which is not the sinking of the Charles but the recount of that tragedy in the distribution of the poem, its sale in song and sheet by a balladmonger.

Here, too, Shaw has left a very specific record of his travels and travails hawking this poem. His peddling circuits wound through a large piece of southern Maine. After printing the song in Portland, he peddled it around town before following a sales route that went from Portland to Saco on the south and west and then to Buxton, Windham, and Gorham on the north and west, an itinerary of roughly 80 miles. According to Shaw’s record, the trip took a week, during which “I had four thousand & and five hundred copies printed of, and disposd of nigh three thousand.”⁸⁰ The next week, he rode a circuit northeast from Portland to Bath and New Gloucester, traveling around 90 miles. In August, Shaw followed a trade route west, to Limington, Maine, and Effingham, New Hampshire, southwest to Wolfeboro, and then back through Buxton to Standish, a journey of more than 100 miles. Along the way, he stayed with Methodist friends and elders, attended meetings, and listened to much “lively exortation.”⁸¹ While his diary emphasizes his successes, he also mentions setbacks on the road, such as one near Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where “the colledge Boys beset me devil like, and I told them that they were burning to preach the gospel, & I told them that if they did not mend there ways, the devil would have them.”⁸² The community imagined in the poem did not necessarily materialize in the way that the poem envisioned, for the crowds gathering to listen and buy were not always docile. The abuse also indicates the widely different responses that the itinerant poet could anticipate. When distributed in the Methodist meeting, poems like the “Mournful Song” on the Knight family tragedy elicited communal grief, godly exhortation, and the desire to recirculate the poem in other contexts. The “colledge boys,” however, beset Shaw when they met him in the street. The derisive abuse he suffered shows how fragile the poet’s right to perform in public could be, especially when presented in the guise of the balladmonger peddling his wares. Publication and publicity did not necessarily meliorate Shaw’s marginal relation to public culture, for while so much of his work expresses his inability to be recognized as a poet, even when such recognition came, it could easily be used against him.

The incident rankled and perhaps happened on other occasions as well, for Shaw complained about this sort of harassment in a poem, “To Those that Cry Me Poet,” which he recorded in another of his daybooks sometime around 1837.

To all of you, that ofton due

At me both laugh and hout

For all you say, this is my way

My Rhyems for to throw out

I make a Rhyem, in little time

As fast as I can say

A song by heart, and never start

On jot out of my way—

You that hant wit, do say poet

And at me you do hollow

With your mouth wide so one can slide

Clear down into your swollow

Is not it shame, that some by name

Beset me in the street

And at me yell, which is not well

Such languge to repeate—

As true as I, cant pass you by

Without that word you Poet

You cry aloude, like man thats proude

And thus I think you shoe it—

What have I dun, that makes your fun

At me to fly so harsh

When I to you, prove always true,

But you throw out your trash.⁸³

This mournful address shows that attaining the name of “poet” was not all Shaw thought it would be. The crowd’s mockery is a bit hard to parse: hooting and shouting “you Poet” at Shaw might undermine his claim to the title by derisively (if implicitly) contrasting his “Rhyems” with an idealized sense of poetry as elevated language, or “you Poet” might itself just be a term of contempt, like “get a job!” Either way, the public performance of the Poet is the source of conflict (“Is not it shame, that some by name / Beset me in the street”). Such a performance is, of course, enacted through the making of verses: Shaw “throws out” his rhymes (which could variously mean that he produces, disseminates, or discards them) “as fast as I can say / A song by heart.” These acts of song making in the street prompt retaliatory verbal acts from his antagonists: “You that hant wit, do say poet / And at me you do hollow.” And this retaliation prompts from Shaw his recurring resentment about status and schooling:

Ye Silly Fools, go to your schools

Pay for your entrence in

Your night-cap darn, an manners lern

Before I come agin—⁸⁴

In this case, though, it is the allegedly superior college boys who prove their ill breeding by harassing Shaw in the street; schooling and status are revealed as structures of power that merely enforce existing hierarchies rather than reflect inherent worth. Shaw is decried as “you Poet” not (or not only) because his poems are bad or his intentions impure, but because in issuing them publicly, he steps out of his place; literariness colludes with public decorum to push a poet like Shaw off the street, if not off the page. One final, poignant example encapsulates the conflicted place of poetry in the social world of the early nineteenth century, which Shaw’s example makes manifest.

Then took my pen & ink in hand

Here in this Book I did it land

So any one may reade the same

And so take it from whence it came

Its Author never went to school

To lern to spell & write by Rule

As men of lerning are made great

By Schooling, both for Church & State—

But I a poore old Ignorent Man

At first when I for self began

Livd in the woods & what I have be

Came luckily as men may see—

By luck and chance My Parents they

Lernt me to Reade from day to day

Saying I should a Reader be

As people now may look & see⁸⁵

These opening stanzas portray a social world stratified by uneven access to language and education, and they announce Shaw’s subject-hood in a gesture of performative literacy. The material process of writing (“pen & ink in hand”) produces the poem as a testament to Shaw’s creative management of the tools of education, which normally underwrite status (“men of lerning are made great / By Schooling, both for Church & State”) but in his case testify by contrast to his distance from the seats of cultural power. His home schooling retains its rough edges—he never did “lern to spell & write by Rule” but succeeded mostly through “luck and chance” and his parents’ initiative—yet he has prospered enough that an implied audience of future readers can open his book and find there the legacy of literacy in the shape of a poem.

For I began to write while young

In Poetree imployd my Tung

And Thoughts & hours by night & day

As if it was but sport & pley

On many thing I chose to write

Both on the day & on the night

As god ofton did leede my mind

On subjects as I was Inclind,

And on many a Funereal Song

I have studied & wrote along

And some of them I sent abroade

As if these things were ends of god⁸⁶

His fluency with poems crosses different kinds of media (both writing and speaking) with such ease and abundance (“As if it was but sport & pley”) that it seems divinely inspired, although God simply leads his mind “on subjects as I was Inclind” already. This qualified divine sanction is an important component of the backward glance that he casts over his career. The popularity of the songs he has “sent abroade” makes it appear “as if these things were ends of god,” but ultimately their legacy is uncertain. What is certain, though, is that this poet’s lifelong project of writing poems touches on almost every aspect of his social world, from the organization of public life, to the structure of literate communication, and finally to the constitution of the subject, who can exist through the creation and consumption of poems, as the final stanza makes clear. The successful materialization of poetry in the community seems to underwrite the hand of God, but, as he acknowledges in a haunting conclusion:

Whether they be, I cannot tell

But god surely doth know full well

And so I cease—at this time draw

A line & end with—Thomas Shaw.⁸⁷

* * *

The case studies of Plummer and Shaw lead to several preliminary conclusions about the work of poems in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century. First, “poetry” was an irregular category—not a genre but a mixed bag of genres arrayed in an unstable hierarchy. Because of that instability, the culture of poetry was only ever partly legible to its members, and which objects could count as poems—and which people as poets—was subject to considerable debate, because literariness was a shifting standard, although still forceful nonetheless. Second, literariness is mediated—it is subject to the scenes and conditions in and by which it is produced—but it also mediates broader social contests about public order and the legitimation of power. The sometimes scurrilous, sometimes scandalous ballads and doggerel verses I examine here played a particularly salient role in such contests. These poems were not only widely consumed, but more important, they were also widely produced, often by individuals with, at best, tangential access to cultural and economic capital. Third, much of the anxious force behind such poems derives from the dense relationship between their modes of circulation—the wayward, vagrant ways in which they moved, beyond established paths of communication—and the genres of scandal, gossip, rumor, slander, and news. While none of these communicative genres may seem particularly germane to modern senses of poetry (at least, not to good poetry), for nineteenth-century readers, the associations made a key contribution to the work of these texts. The readers of Plummer or Shaw did not value their poems—most of the copies that survive are badly mutilated—because they were not valuable, at least not in a literary sense. Instead, the social exchange value enticed their many readers (or customers, since they were balladmongers). “Ballads” like these thus condense the power of circulation as a social force. This force could be applied to scandal, news, and tragedy, or it could be mobilized in the service of politics. As the most controversial and also communal form of antebellum political association, antislavery and its poetics will be the subject of the next chapter.