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With the Revolutionary War there was naturally a great output of printed matter. Controversial pamphlets, state papers, diaries, letters, and journals, plays (with prologues and epilogues), songs, ballads and satires, all swelled the total. No one can fully understand the Revolution or the period after it who does not read extensively in this material; yet, taken in its length and breadth, the prose and most of the verse are important as history rather than as literature. Out of the numerous company of writers who were producing while Franklin was an aging man and while Crèvecœur was an American farmer, one, Philip Freneau, may be considered as chief representative, and two others, Francis Hopkinson and John Trumbull, deserve a briefer comment.

Francis Hopkinson (1737–1791), the Philadelphian, was well characterized in a much-quoted letter from John Adams to his wife in August, 1776:

At this shop I met Mr. Francis Hopkinson, late a mandamus councillor of New Jersey, now a member of the Continental Congress, who … was liberally educated, and is a painter and a poet. … He is one of your pretty little, curious, ingenious men. … He is genteel and well-bred and is very social. I wish I had leisure and tranquillity of mind to amuse myself with those elegant and ingenious arts of painting, sculpture, statuary, architecture and music. But I have not.

Undoubtedly Hopkinson’s work savors of the dilettante throughout; yet part of its historical significance is inherent in this fact, for Hopkinson is one of the earliest examples of talented versatility in American life. He had virtues to complement the accomplishments half enviously cited by John Adams. He was a learned judge, a stalwart revolutionist, a practical man of affairs, and a humorist.

His collected writings in three volumes were done in the best manner of eighteenth-century England. Five sixths of them are essays, written not in series, but quite of the Spectator type. Three prose satires—“A Pretty Story” (1774), “A Prophecy” (1776), and “The New Roof” (1778)—are as important a trio as any written by one man in the Revolutionary days. The other sixth—his verse—belonged no less to the polite literature of the period. There are Miltonic imitations, songs, sentiments, hymns, a fable, and a piece of advice to a young lady. There are occasional poems, including birthday and wedding greetings, dramatic prologues and epilogues, elegies, and rimed epitaphs. Verses of these kinds, if they were all Hopkinson had written, would indicate a hopeless subservience to prevailing English fashions. But Hopkinson was nobody’s vassal. When he wrote

My generous heart disdains

The slave of love to be,

I scorn his servile chains,

And boast my liberty,

he might as truly have asserted his refusal to submit to any sort of trammels except at his own option. Into a few imitation ballads he poured the new wine of Revolutionary sentiment, one of which, “The Battle of the Kegs,” with its mocking jollity, put good cheer in all colonial hearts in the times that tried men’s souls. It was his jaunty self-control, the quality of heroism without its pompous mannerisms, that set Hopkinson off in contrast with his fellows. He was almost the least pretentious of them all, yet few were more effective.

John Trumbull (1750–1831), most talented of the “Hartford Wits,” tried his hand, like Hopkinson, at the conventional poetical subjects, but, unlike him, the bulk of his verse was contained in two long satirical essays: “The Progress of Dulness” (1772 and 1773) and “M’Fingal” (1776 and 1782). Apparently he had no further ambition for himself or other American poets than to

bid their lays with lofty Milton vie;

Or wake from nature’s themes the moral song,

And shine with Pope, with Thompson and with Young.

This land her Swift and Addison shall view,

The former honors equalled by the new;

Here shall some Shakspeare charm the rising age,

And hold in magic chains the listening stage;

A second Watts shall strike the heavenly lyre,

And other muses other bards inspire.

Nevertheless, in these two satires he wrote first from a provincial and then from an early national point of view. “The Progress of Dulness” is a disquisition on how not to bring up children. He chose for his examples Tom Brainless, Dick Hairbrain, and Harriet Simper. He put the boys through college (Trumbull was a graduate of Yale), making one a dull preacher and the other a rake. Harriet, the American counterpart of Biddy Tipkin in Steele’s “Tender Husband” or Arabella in Mrs. Lennox’s “The Female Quixote,” is fed on flattery, social ambition, and the romantic fiction of the hour (see p. 103), becomes a coquette and a jilt, and, thrown over by Dick, sinks into obscurity as the faded wife of Parson Tom. This was homemade satire, democratic in its choice and treatment of character, and clearly located in and about New Haven, Connecticut.

So also, and much more aggressively, was the rimed political document “M’Fingal,” an immensely popular diatribe at the Tory of the Revolution—his attitude, his general demeanor, and his methods of argument. It recounts the events of a day in a New England town which was torn by the dissensions between the rival factions in the opening days of the conflict, and describes in detail the ways in which this particularly offensive Tory was driven to cover. The modern reader must bring to it a good deal of student interest if he expects to complete the reading and understand it, even with the aid of Trumbull’s copious footnotes. For the moment it was a skillful piece of journalistic writing. Trumbull knew how to appeal to the prejudices of his sympathizers (for controversial war writing confirms rather than convinces); he knew how to draw on their limited store of general knowledge; and he knew how to lead them on with a due employment of literary ingenuities like puns, multiple rimes, and word elisions, and a judicious resort to rough jocosity and vituperation. “M’Fingal” was war literature with all its defects of passion, uncandor, and speciousness, but the score or more of editions through which it ran before 1800 are evidence that it reached the low mark at which it was aimed. If it had the faults of its kind, so in later years did “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Mr. Britling sees it Through.”

This most representative poet of the Revolutionary period was Philip Freneau, who lived from 1752 to 1832 and who was active in authorship for forty-five years, from 1770 on. He was a graduate of Princeton College in 1771, gained a sudden reputation as a political satirist in 1775, and lived a strangely varied life from then till well into the nineteenth century. For three years he lived in Santa Cruz and Bermuda. In 1779 he sailed to the Azores, and for a six-year period at a later time he was engaged in Atlantic coast trade. From 1784 to 1807 he went the circle in five stages as editor, seaman, editor, farmer, and seaman again. Everything he did he seems to have done hard, and nothing held him long. It is a kind of life which does not seem surprising in a man who has often been called “Poet of the Revolution,” for he wrote as vigorously as he sailed or farmed or edited, and he plowed his political satires quite as deep and straight as he plowed the seas and the furrows of his fields. After his bitter experience of three months on a British prison ship, he blazed out with a savage flame of verse which has carried the horrors of this particular form of war brutality down the centuries to greet the “atrocities” of the present. When the editors of rival papers and rival parties annoyed him he scourged them with a savageness of attack which was notable even in a day when journalism knew no restraint and recognized no proprieties. Freneau had at least one title to the friendship of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who loved “a good hater.”

This vehement side of his life resulted in a generous amount of war poetry which would be remembered—or forgotten—with the best of the rest of its kind if it were all that he had written. In a brief survey like the present chapter it can therefore serve the double purpose of illustrating the verse of the Revolution and of representing a less important aspect of his whole work. In this respect it is comparable to the Civil-War and antislavery poetry of Whittier. Sometimes this verse is full of scorn, as in “The Midnight Consultations,” in which Lord Howe is ridiculed as presiding over a council which arrives at the following heroic conclusion:

Three weeks—ye gods!—nay, three long years it seems

Since roast beef I have touched, except in dreams,

In sleep, choice dishes to my view repair,

Waking, I gape and champ the empty air—

… . … .

On neighbouring isles uncounted cattle stray,

Fat beeves, and swine, an ill-defended prey—

These are fit victims for my noonday dish,

These, if my soldiers act as I would wish,

In one short week should glad your maws and mine;

On mutton we will sup—on roast beef dine.

Sometimes it is full of the hate which war always engenders. Freneau wrote no more bitterly about the king, Lord North, and the leading generals in active service against the colonists than did Jonathan Odell—the foremost Tory satirist—about Washington and his associates. As the war went on, and the likelihood of American success became stronger, Freneau’s tone softened, as he could well afford to have it, and in such a product as “The Political Balance” he wrote with nothing more offensive than the mockery of a rather ungenerous victor. This poem, characterized by well-maintained humor, is one of the best of its kind. It represents Jove as one day looking over the book of Fate and of coming to an incomplete account of Britain, for the Fates had neglected to reveal the outcome of the war. In order to find out for himself, he directs Vulcan to make an exact model of the globe, borrows the scales from Virgo, and plans to foretell the future by setting the mother country on one side and the States on the other. When, after many difficulties, the experiment is tried, of course the States overbalance the little island. Then, to make sure, he adds the foreign dominions on Britain’s side,

But the gods were confounded and struck with surprise,

And Vulcan could hardly believe his own eyes!

For (such was the purpose and guidance of fate)

Her foreign dominions diminish’d her weight—

By which it appeared, to Britain’s disaster,

Her foreign possessions were changing their master.

Then as he replac’d them, said Jove with a smile—

“Columbia shall never be rul’d by an isle—

But vapours and darkness around her shall rise,

And tempests conceal her a while from our eyes;

“So locusts in Egypt their squadrons display,

And rising, disfigure the face of the day;

So the moon, at her full, has a frequent eclipse,

And the sun in the ocean diurnally dips.

“Then cease your endeavors, ye vermin of Britain—

(And here, in derision, their island he spit on)

’T is madness to seek what you never can find,

Or think of uniting what nature disjoin’d;

“But still you may flutter awhile with your wings,

And spit out your venom, and brandish your stings,

Your hearts are as black, and as bitter as gall,

A curse to yourselves, and a blot on the Ball.”

After the successful completion of the war it was only natural that Americans in their rejoicing should imagine the glorious future that awaited their new independence. The more vivid their imaginations were, the more splendid were the prophecies they indulged in. As we read over the records of their lofty hopes we are reminded of commencement oratory; and the likeness is not unreal, for these post-Revolution poets were in fact very like eager college graduates, diploma in hand, looking forward to vague but splendid careers. It was in these poems too that the germs of Fourth of July oratory first took root—the oratory described by James Fenimore Cooper in his “Home as Found” (chap. xxi):

There were the usual allusions to Greece and Rome, between the republics of which and that of this country there exists some such affinity as is to be found between a horse-chestnut and a chestnut horse, or that of mere words; and a long catalogue of national glories that might very well have sufficed for all republics, both of antiquity and of our own time. But when the orator came to speak of the American character, and particularly of the intelligence of the nation, he was most felicitous, and made the largest investments in popularity. According to his account of the matter, no other people possessed a tithe of the knowledge, or a hundredth part of the honesty and virtue of the very community he was addressing; and after laboring for ten minutes to convince his hearers that they already knew everything, he wasted several more in trying to persuade them to undertake further acquisitions of the same nature.

These elephantine poems were written each in several “books,” to each one of which was prefixed an outline which, in the language of the day, was called “the argument.” Here is a part of the outline for Book VII of Timothy Dwight’s “Greenfield Hill” (1794):

Happiness of U. S. contrasted to Eastern Despotism. Universal Prevalence of Freedom. Unfortified, and therefore safe, state of U. S. Influence of our state of Society on the Mind. Public Property employed for the Public Benefit. Penal Administrations improved by Benevolence. Policy enlarges its scope. Knowledge promoted. Improvements in Astronomical and other Instruments of Science. Improvements of the Americans, in Natural Philosophy—Poetry—Music—and Moral Science. State of the American Clergy. Manners refined. Artificial Manners condemned. American Women. Cultivation advanced. Other Nations visit this country, and learn the nature, and causes, of our happiness. Conclusion.

And here is a part of the argument to Book IX of Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad,” in which he demonstrates that the present government of America is a culmination of all human progress:

… the ancient and modern states of the arts and of society, Crusades, Commerce, Hanseatic League, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, Herschel, Descartes, Bacon, Printing Press, Magnetic Needle, Geographic Discoveries, Federal System in America.

Freneau had shared all this prophetic enthusiasm, and had expressed it even before the war, partly in an actual commencement poem on “The Rising Glory of America” and partly in a series of eighteen “Pictures of Columbus.” Just after graduation he had written:

I see, I see

A thousand Kingdoms rais’d, cities and men

Num’rous as sand upon the ocean shore;

Th’ Ohio then shall glide by many a town

Of note; and where the Mississippi stream

By forests shaded now runs weeping on,

Nations shall grow, and States not less in fame

Than Greece and Rome of old; we too shall boast

Our Alexanders, Pompeys, heroes, kings,

That in the womb of time yet dormant lye

Waiting the joyful hour of life and light.

After the war, however, he did not rejoin the increasing choir who were singing this kind of choral. His most interesting bit of prophecy, which must have seemed to his contemporaries to be a piece of the airiest fancy, has been amazingly verified more than a century after he wrote it. This is “The Progress of Balloons,” written in the jaunty tone of “The Political Balance”:

The stagemen, whose gallopers scarce have the power

Through the dirt to convey you ten miles in an hour,

When advanc’d to balloons shall so furiously drive

You’ll hardly know whether you’re dead or alive.

The man who at Boston sets out with the sun,

If the wind should be fair, may be with us at one,

At Gunpowder Ferry drink whiskey at three

And at six be at Edentown, ready for tea.

(The machine shall be order’d, we hardly need say,

To travel in darkness as well as by day)

At Charleston by ten he for sleep shall prepare,

And by twelve the next day be the devil knows where.

… . … .

If Britain should ever disturb us again,

(As they threaten to do in the next George’s reign)

No doubt they will play us a set of new tunes,

And pepper us well from their fighting balloons.

… . … .

Such wonders as these from balloons shall arise—

And the giants of old that assaulted the skies

With their Ossa on Pelion, shall freely confess

That all they attempted was nothing to this.

This, of course, was newspaper poetry, and Freneau, for long years of his life, was a newspaper man. Even his lines “To Sir Toby,” a slaveholding sugar-planter in Jamaica, spirited as they are, are in effect an open letter in protest against human slavery, and they were printed in the National Gazette in 1792.

The really poetical work of Freneau, however, which entitles him to an attention greater than that for his fellows, had nothing to do with political or military events of the day. They were his shorter poems on American nature and American tradition; and a distinguishing feature of them was that they were different from the English poetry of the time, in form as well as in content. As a young man Freneau had set out on his career by writing after the style of Milton and Dryden and Pope and their lesser imitators. This was absolutely natural. Until after the Revolution, America was England; and it was more nearly like England in speech and in thought than much of Scotland and Ireland are to-day. All the refinements of America were derived from English sources; practically all the colonists’ reading was from English authors. But after the Revolution there came a strong reaction of feeling. We can look to Freneau’s own rimes (journalistic ones again) for an explanation of the new and native quality of his later verse; they are called “Literary Importation,” and they conclude as follows:

It seems we had spirit to humble a throne,

Have genius for science inferior to none,

But hardly encourage a plant of our own:

If a college be planned

’Tis all at a stand

’Till to Europe we send at a shameful expense,

To send us a bookworm to teach us some sense.

Can we never be thought to have learning or grace

Unless it be brought from that horrible place

Where tyranny reigns with her impudent face;

And popes and pretenders

And sly faith-defenders

Have ever been hostile to reason and wit,

Enslaving a world that shall conquer them yet.

’Tis a folly to fret at the picture I draw:

And I say what was said by a Doctor Magraw;

“If they give us their Bishops, they’ll give us their law.”

How that will agree

With such people as we,

Let us leave to the learned to reflect on awhile,

And say what they think in a handsomer stile.

As a consequence of this feeling that America should be different, the tendency grew to seek out native subject matter and to cease conscious imitation of English literary models. For the next half century American authors were contending, every now and then, that native themes should occupy their attention, and a good deal of verse and prose was written with this idea in mind. Most of it was more conscientious than interesting, for literature, to be genuinely effective, must be produced not to demonstrate a theory but to express what is honestly in the author’s mind. The first step toward achieving nationality in American writing was, therefore, to achieve new and independent habits of national thinking. The Irish mind, for example, is basically different from the English mind, and Irish literature has therefore a long and beautiful history of its own, in spite of the fact that Ireland is near to England and subject to it. But the Australian is simply a transplanted English-speaking, English-thinking mind, and Australia has consequently produced no literature of which the world is yet aware.

Now Freneau was a naturally independent thinker. He was educated and well read in the best of English and classical literature. But unlike most of his fellow authors, he was not a city man, nor a teacher, preacher, or lawyer. His hands were hardened by the steersman’s wheel and the plow, and doubtless much of his verse—or at least the inspiration for it—came to him on shipboard or in the field rather than in the library. In the midst of the crowd he was an easy man to stir up to fighting pitch. All his war verse shows this. Yet when he was alone and undisturbed he inclined to placid meditation, and he expressed himself in the simplest ways. As a young man he wrote a little poem called “Retirement.” It is the kind of thing that many other eighteenth-century poets—confirmed city dwellers—wrote in moments of temporary world-weariness; but Freneau’s life-story shows that he really meant it:

A cottage I could call my own

Remote from domes of care;

A little garden, wall’d with stone,

The wall with ivy overgrown,

A limpid fountain near,

Would more substantial joys afford,

More real bliss impart

Than all the wealth that misers hoard,

Than vanquish’d worlds, or worlds restor’d—

Mere cankers of the heart!

And there was another poem of his youth which told a secret of his real character. This was “The Power of Fancy,” an imitation of Milton in its form, but genuinely Freneau’s in its sentiment. The best of his later work is really a compound of these suggestions—poems of fancy composed in retirement. Thus he wrote on “The Indian Burying Ground,” interpreting the fact that

The Indian, when from life releas’d,

Again is seated with his friends

And shares again the joyous feast,

instead of being buried recumbent as white men are. And thus he wrote in “To a Caty-did,” “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and “On a Honey Bee,” little lyrics of nature and natural life, which were almost the first verse written in America based on native subject matter and expressed in simple, direct, and unpretentious form.

Nathaniel Ames, in one of his early almanacs, recorded soberly:

MAY

Now Winters rage abates, now chearful Hours

Awake the Spring, and Spring awakes the Flowers.

The opening Buds salute the welcome Day,

And Earth relenting, feels the genial Ray.

The Blossoms blow, the Birds on Bushes sing;

And Nature has accomplish’d all the Spring.

This was perfectly conventional and perfectly indefinite; not a single flower, bud, blossom, bird, or bush is specified. The six lines amount to a general formula for spring and would apply equally well to Patagonia, Italy, New England, or northern Siberia. Mr. R. Lewis, who wrote on “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis” in 1730, improves on this:

First born of Spring, here the Pacone appears.

Whose golden Root a silver Blossom rears.

In spreading Tufts see there the Crowfoot, blue,

On whose green Leaves still shines a globous Dew;

Behold the Cinque-foil, with its dazling Dye

Of flaming Yellow, wounds the tender Eye.

But there enclos’d the grassy Wheat is seen

To heal the aching Sight with cheerful Green.

Lewis mentions definite flowers, colors, and characteristics, but he never misses a chance to tuck in a conventional adjective or participle, and he is led by them into weaving the extravagant fancy of an eye made to ache by flaming and dazzling colors, and healed by the cheerful green of the wheat field. In contrast to these, Freneau’s little nature poems are as exact as the second and as simple as the subject on which he writes:

In a branch of willow hid

Sings the evening Caty-did:

From the lofty locust bough

Feeding on a drop of dew.

In her suit of green array’d

Hear her singing in the shade,

Caty-did, Caty-did, Caty-did.

Such simplicity as this does not seem at all remarkable to-day, but if it be compared with the fixed formalities that belonged to almost all the verse of Freneau’s time it will stand out as a remarkable exception.

On account of the two kinds of poetry which Freneau published he has often been given misleading titles by his admirers. Those who have been interested in him mainly or exclusively from the historical point of view have christened him the “Poet of the American Revolution.” This is unfair because of the implication that he gave his best energy to this and had no other right to distinction. Even as a journalist he was more than poet of the Revolution, since he wrote on local and timely themes for many years after its close. This designation does not claim enough for him. The other title is defective for the opposite reason, that it claims too much. This is the “Father of American Poetry.” Such a sweeping phrase ought to be avoided resolutely. It is doubly false, in suggesting that there was no American poetry before he wrote and that everything since has been derived from him. The facts are that he had a native poetic gift which would have led to his writing poetry had there never been a war between the colonies and England, but that when the war came on he was one of the most effective penmen on his side; that entrance into the field of public affairs diverted him from the paths of quiet life; that after the war he continued both kinds of writing. He never ceased wholly to think and write about “affairs,” but more and more he speculated on the future, dreamed of the picturesque past, and played with themes of graceful and tender sentiment. He is very much worth reading as a commentator on his own times, and he is no less worth reading for the beauty of many poems quite without reference to the time or place in which they were written.

The long and fruitful colonial period must not be overlooked by any honest student of American literature, yet it may fairly be regarded as no more than a preparatory stage. It has the same relationship to the whole story as do the ancestry, boyhood, and education to the development of an individual. In the broad and brief survey attempted in these chapters a few leading facts have been reviewed about the youth of America: (1) Everything characteristic of the early settlers was derived directly from England, those in the South representing the aristocratic traditions of king and court, and those in the North reflecting the democratic revolt of the Puritans. As a natural consequence of these differences the writing of books soon waned in Virginia and the neighboring colonies, but developed consistently in Massachusetts and New England. (2) The attempt of the Puritans to force all New Englanders to think the same thoughts and worship in the same way was unsuccessful from the start, and the most interesting writers of the seventeenth century reveal the spread of disturbing influences. The first three chosen as examples are Thomas Morton, the frank and unscrupulous enemy of the Puritans; Nathaniel Ward, a sturdy Puritan who was alarmed at the growth of anti-Puritan influences; and Roger Williams, a deeply religious preacher, who rebelled against the control of the Church in New England just as he and others had formerly rebelled in the mother country. (3) Even in the first half century a good deal of verse was written: sometimes, as in the case of “The Day of Doom,” as a mere rimed statement of Puritan theology; but sometimes, as in the case of Anne Bradstreet and her followers, as an expression of real poetic feeling. (4) With the passage to the eighteenth century the community was clearly slipping from the grasp of the Puritans. Evidence is ample from three types of colonists: the Mathers, who were fighting a desperate but losing battle to retain control; Samuel Sewall, who, although a Puritan, was willing to accept reasonable changes; and Mrs. Sarah Kemble Knight, who said little at the time, but in her private journals showed the existence of growing disrespect for the old habits of thought. (5) Benjamin Franklin, whose work is more valuable than that of any of his predecessors, is also completely representative of the complete swing away from religious enthusiasm to a hard-headed worldliness which was prevailing in England in the eighteenth century. (6) On the other hand, Crèvecœur, writing just before the Revolution, sounded the note of thanksgiving to the Lord that America was different from the Old World, and emphasized what were the conditions of life that were worth fighting to save. (7) Finally, out of all the roster of talented writers during the Revolutionary War, Freneau was selected as the most gifted poet of the period, both as an indirect recorder of the conflict and as an author of poetry on native themes in no way related to the war.