When he entered Princeton (Nassau Hall), great events were beginning to unfold. The patriots of Massachusetts, protesting against an English law, had been declared rebels, the leading offenders had been ordered across the sea for trial, the troops of General Gates had marched into Boston. The college was a hot-bed of sedition. That superb patriot, John Witherspoon, was president, and among the students who gathered in the evening in the room that Freneau shared with Madison, were ‘Light Horse’ Harry Lee, Aaron Burr, William Bradford, destined to close an exceptionally promising career as a member of Washington’s Cabinet, and Brockholst Livingston.
Nothing that Freneau ever said or did in after-life that was not foreshadowed at Princeton can be found. His tongue was sharp, and his pen dripped the vitriol of satire. He wrote much verse, and long before the Declaration of Independence, he had a hatred of kings. Even thus early in his ‘Pyramid of Kings,’ he made profession of his democracy.
‘Millions of slaves beneath their labors fainted,
Who were here doomed to toil incessantly,
And years elapsed while groaning myriads strove
To raise this mighty tomb—and but to hide
The worthless bones of an Egyptian king.’
Under the encouragement of Witherspoon, all the patriotic fire within him burst into flame.
Long before Washington, Adams, or Franklin were dreaming of a republic and absolute independence, this was his dream. During the time he was supposed to be poring over Coke and Blackstone, he was feverishly plying his pen writing political articles for the press. He was a rebel by nature. He wrote deliberately to arouse a burning hatred of tyranny and a militant love of liberty. He sang the songs of hate, and read and studied the Roman and French satirists to perfect himself in the art he was to use so effectively later. When the war began he threw himself into the struggle. A pathetic little figure, this—a mere wisp of a boy charging on ahead to smash the connection with England, only to find that the other patriots had no such thought. They were fighting for rights within the empire, not for independence. Even then he was too radical for his times or the comfort of his associates. They were thinking of rights, and he of liberty—and in sheer disgust he sailed away to Jamaica.
There was the illusion of liberty on the sea and there was beauty and poetry, and there was opportunity, too, to prepare himself for the part he was to play a little later. It was always his joy to be prepared. On that voyage he perfected himself in the science of navigation. In the languorous air of Santa Cruz he luxuriated in the beauties of nature at its richest, and sought to transcribe to paper all he saw and felt. He had an irresistible impulse for creation—a poet’s passion for expression.[591] But even here he was a rebel born to protest. Slavery at its worst was all about him—and he hit it hard in his descriptions.
It was while a guest of the Governor of Bermuda, writing love sonnets to the fair daughter of his host, that the news came of the Declaration of Independence. This was the sort of rebellion Freneau could understand, and he hurried home to find that a battle had been fought at his very door, and that the cushions of the Tennant church he had attended had been stained with blood. Instantly he took out letters of marque and reprisal from the Continental Congress, and put to sea to battle with the British ships. Plunging patriotically with all his means he had a ship built for his own use, named it the Aurora, and sought the enemy. In a battle his ship was struck, and it was as a prisoner on the deck of an enemy vessel that he saw his ship, his fortune, sink beneath the waves. The rest was torture and a living death. The Scorpion on which he was confined was a miserable old hulk converted into a prison ship, reeking with foul smells and rank disease, and into this he was packed where the accommodations were not fit for swine. One by one he saw his fellows perish from disease and neglect, listened in the night to their shrieks of pain and dying groans. When verging on death, he was transferred to the Hunter which some sardonic soul had dubbed a ‘Hospital Prison Ship.’ Its horrors have come down to us in his own poems with its bitter execration of the Hessian doctor.
‘Here uncontrolled he exercised his trade,
And grew experienced by the deaths he made;
By frequent blows we from his cane endured
He killed at least as many as he cured.’
At length he was exchanged. Leaving the vessel with a raging fever, with pains in his joints that made walking a torture, he turned toward home, going through the woods ‘for fear of terrifying the neighbors with [his] ghastly looks.’[592] This was the background against which he was to view Washington’s policy of neutrality in the war between France and England. He hated England from that hour to his death.
Broken in health almost beyond hope of redemption, his ship sunk, his money gone, the war still on, he turned to his other weapon and took up the pen. ‘The Prison Ship’ helped to fire the patriots shivering about the cold camps. The poem of contemptuous imprecation, in imitation of Horace, on the treason of Arnold, fanned their wrath. That on the victory of Paul Jones heartened the downcast. Poem followed poem, copied throughout the country, many published on strips of paper and distributed through the army. Some were posted in conspicuous places where they could be committed to memory. Paine wrote ‘The Crisis’ in prose, Freneau wrote of the crisis in verse; both were a tonic for the wavering. Even Washington did not then speak of him as ‘that rascal Freneau’ and that characterization even from Washington cannot rob him of the glory of having been ‘the Poet of the Revolution’ who gave his health, his entire fortune, almost his life, and all his heart to the cause of liberty.