A Manual of American Literature

by Unknown

Francis Hopkinson was born in Philadelphia in 1737. Even in these days, he would have been regarded as a man of quite unusual cultivation, having in reality many solid as well as shining accomplishments. He was a distinguished practitioner of the law; he became an eminent judge; he was a statesman trained by much study and experience; he was a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, a mechanician, an inventor, a musician and a composer of music, a man of literary knowledge and practice, a writer of airy and dainty songs, a clever artist with pencil and brush, and a humourist of unmistakable power. For us Americans, the name of Francis Hopkinson lives—if indeed it does live—chiefly on account of its presence in the august roll-call of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was a devotee to the law, who never took farewell of the Muses. And thus it came about that, from the autumn of 1774 on until the very close of the long struggle, the cause of the Revolution, at nearly every stage and emergency of it, was rescued from depression, was quickened, was cheered forward, was given strength, by the vivacity of this delightful writer.

For the development among the Americans in 1776 of the robust political courage invoked by their new doctrine of national separation, it was necessary that the amiable note of provincialism—the filial obtuseness of the colonial mind—should be broken up, and that the Englishmen who lived in America should begin to find food for mirth and even for derision in the peculiarities of the Englishmen who lived in England. Toward this important political result, Hopkinson made some contribution in his so-called Letter written by a Foreigner on the Character of the English Nation. Under an old device for securing disinterested judgments on national peculiarities, Hopkinson here represents a cultivated foreigner as spending some time in England in the latter part of 1776, and as giving to a friend in his own country a cool but very satirical analysis of the alleged vices, foibles, and absurdities of the English people, and of the weak and wrong things in their treatment of their late colonists in America. From these character-sketches by the supposed foreigner in London in the year 1776—themselves by no means despicable for neat workmanship and for humorous power—it is not difficult to make out just how Hopkinson’s playful writings were adapted to the achievement of serious political results, as ridding colonial-minded Americans of the intellectual restraint imposed almost unconsciously by their old provincial awe of England, and helping them to subject the metropolitan race to caustic and even contemptuous handling, as a necessary condition of national free-mindedness and of bold dissent on questions of political authority and control.

The expedition of the year 1777, under the command of Sir William Howe, resulted in considerable temporary disaster to the American cause. Nevertheless, it was this very expedition, so full of prosperity for the British, which in its sequel gave to Hopkinson the occasion for his most successful stroke as a humorous writer. Sir William, having gained a brief succession of victories, finding Philadelphia an agreeable place of repose, concluded to settle himself down in that city. The surrounding inhabitants, who had at first regarded him and his army with no little terror, soon came to regard both with some derision, and to conceive the idea of practising upon both certain experiments which had in them an element of covert mirthfulness, as it were. By a very imaginative and a very rollicking expansion of the actual facts of this small affair, Hopkinson was enabled to compose his celebrated ballad, The Battle of the Kegs. The actual facts of the case are as follows, according to his own later testimony in prose: “Certain machines, in the form of kegs, charged with gunpowder, were sent down the river to annoy the British shipping at Philadelphia. The danger of these machines being discovered, the British manned the wharfs and shipping, and discharged their small arms and cannons at everything they saw floating in the river during the ebb tide.” This jingling little story of The Battle of the Kegs—mere doggerel though it is—flew from colony to colony, and gave the weary and anxious people the luxury of genuine and hearty laughter in very scorn of the enemy. To the cause of the Revolution, it was perhaps worth as much, just then, by way of emotional tonic and of military inspiration, as the winning of a considerable battle would have been. From a literary point of view, The Battle of the Kegs is very far from being the best of Hopkinson’s writings.

Nevertheless, for its matter and its manner and for the adaptation of both to the immediate enjoyment of the multitude of readers, it became in his own day the best known of all its author’s productions, even as, since then, it is the only one that has retained any general remembrance in our literature.

Philip Freneau.—The work of Philip Freneau as poet and satirist in direct contact with the American Revolution was broken into two periods,—these periods being separated from each other by an interval of about two years. The first period embraces those months of the year 1775 wherein his own fierce passions, like the passions of his countrymen, were set aflame by the outbreak of hostilities. Thereafter occurred a mysterious lapse in his activity as a writer on themes connected with the great struggle to which he had professed his undying devotion;—he was absent from the country until some time in the year 1778. With the middle of the year 1778 began the second period of his work as Revolutionary poet and satirist, and it did not come to an end, except with the end of the Revolution itself.

After a considerate inspection of the writers and the writings of our Revolutionary era, it is likely that most readers will be inclined to name Philip Freneau as the one American poet of all that time who, though fallen on evil days and driven from his true course somewhat by stormy weather, yet had a high and questionless vocation for poetry. Of his own claim to recognition he was proudly conscious. Nor was he unconscious of all that was malign to his poetic destiny, both in the time and in the place on which his lot was cast. Even in the larger relations which an American poet in the eighteenth century might hold to the development of English poetry everywhere, Freneau did some work, both early and late, so fresh, so original, so unhackneyed, so defiant of the traditions that then hampered and deadened English verse, so delightful in its fearless appropriation of common things for the divine service of poetry, as to entitle him to be called a pioneer of the new poetic age that was then breaking upon the world, and therefore to be classed with Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, and their mighty comrades,—those poetic iconoclasts who, entering the temple of eighteenth-century English verse, broke up its wooden idols, rejected its conventionalised diction, and silenced for ever its pompous, monotonous, and insincere tune. Finally, of Freneau, it remains to be said that, in a certain eminent sense, he was the first American poet of Democracy; and that from the beginning to the end of his career, and in spite of every form of temptation, he remained true—fiercely, savagely true—to the conviction that his part and lot in the world was to be a protagonist on behalf of mere human nature, as against all its assailants whether in church or state. In the year 1795, this combat-loving poet sent forth a second and an enlarged edition of his poems, which had been first issued seven years before; and in some verses which he therein inserted, entitled “To my Book,” one may still hear the proud voice with which he claimed for himself that, whether in other ways successful or not, he was at least a poet militant—ever doing battle on the people’s side.

John Trumbull.—John Trumbull, with an inward vocation for a life of letters, turned away to a calling far more likely to supply him with bread—the profession of the law. It was in November, 1773, that he was admitted to the bar of Connecticut. Being then but twenty-three years of age, he wrote in verse an eternal farewell to verse-making. Notwithstanding all his vows of devotion to the new mistress whom he was to serve, Trumbull could not forget his earlier love. Henceforward, all his fine literary accomplishments, his subtlety, his wit, his gift for ridicule, his training in satire, are to be at the service of the popular cause, and are to produce in M’Fingal one of the world’s masterpieces in political badinage. The time of the poem is shortly after April, 1775. The scene is laid in a certain unnamed New England town, apparently not far from Boston. No literary production was ever a more genuine embodiment of the spirit and life of a people, in the midst of a stirring and world-famous conflict, than is M’Fingal an embodiment of the spirit and life of the American people, in the midst of that stupendous conflict which formed our great epoch of national deliverance. Here we find presented to us, with the vividness of a contemporary experience, the very issues which then divided friends and families and neighbourhood, as they did entire colonies, and at last the empire itself; the very persons and passions of the opposing parties; the very spirit and accent and method of political controversy at that time; and at last, those riotous frolics and that hilarious lawlessness with which the Revolutionary patriots were fond of demonstrating their disapproval of the politics of their antagonists.

Satire is, of course, one of the less noble forms of literary expression; and in satire uttering itself through burlesque, there is special danger of the presence of qualities which are positively ignoble. Yet never was satire employed in a better cause, or for loftier objects, or in a more disinterested spirit. The author of M’Fingal wrote his satire under no personal or petty motive. His poem was a terrific assault on men who, in his opinion, were the public enemies of his country; and he did not delay that assault until they were unable to strike back. M’Fingal belongs, indeed, to a type of literature hard, bitter, vengeful, often undignified; but the hardness of M’Fingal, its bitterness, its vengeful force are directed against persons believed by its author to be the foes—the fashionable and the powerful foes—of human liberty; if at times it surrenders its own dignity, it does so on behalf of the greater dignity of human nature. That M’Fingal is, in its own sphere, a masterpiece, that it has within itself a sort of power never attaching to a mere imitation, is shown by the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American people. Immediately upon its first publication, it perfectly seized and held the attention of the public. It was everywhere read. Probably as many as forty editions of it have been issued in this country and in England. It was one of the forces which drove forward that enormous movement of human thought and passion which we describe as the American Revolution; and in each of the great agitations of American thought and passion which have occurred since that time, occasioned by the French Revolution, by the War of 1812, and by the war which extinguished American slavery, this scorching satire against social reaction, this jeering burlesque on political obstructiveness, has been sent forth again and again into the world, to renew its mirthful and scornful activity in the ever-renewing battle for human progress.

John Dickinson.—Among all the political writings which were the immediate offspring of the baleful Stamp Act dispute, there stand out, as of the highest significance, certain essays which began to make their appearance in a Philadelphia newspaper in the latter part of the year 1767. These essays very soon became celebrated, on both sides of the Atlantic, under the short title of the Farmer’s Letters. Their full title was Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. Though published without the author’s name, they were instantly recognised as the work of John Dickinson; and their appearance may perhaps fairly be described as constituting, upon the whole, the most brilliant event in the literary history of the Revolution. One distinction attaching to them is that they were written by a man who shared in the general excitement over the new attack upon colonial rights, but who desired to compose it rather than to increase it, and especially to persuade his countrymen so to bear their part in the new dispute as to save their rights as men, without losing their happiness as British subjects. Here was a man of powerful and cultivated intellect, with all his interests and all his tastes on the side of order, conservatism, and peace, if only with these could be had political safety and honour. No other serious political essays of the Revolutionary era quite equalled the Farmer’s Letters in literary merit, including in that term the merit of substance as well as of form; and, excepting the political essays of Thomas Paine, which did not begin to appear until nine years later, none equalled the Farmer’s Letters in immediate celebrity, and in direct power upon events. As they first came forth, from week to week, in the Philadelphia newspaper that originally published them, they were welcomed by the delighted interest and sympathy of multitudes of readers in that neighbourhood, and were instantly reproduced in all the twenty-five newspapers then published in America, with but four known exceptions. Within less than four weeks after the last letter had made its appearance, they were all collected and issued as a pamphlet, of which at least eight editions were published in different parts of America. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Farmer’s Letters gained universal attention among the people interested in the rising American dispute. The name of John Dickinson became a name of literary renown surpassing that of any other American, excepting Benjamin Franklin. On the continent of Europe, these essays of the Pennsylvania Farmer became, for a time, the fashion: they were talked of in the salons of Paris; the Farmer himself was likened to Cicero; and almost the highest distinction then possible for any man was bestowed upon him through the notice and applause of Voltaire. Even in England, the success of these writings was remarkable, and was shown quite as much in the censures as in the praises which were lavished upon them. Among the English admirers of the Farmer’s Letters was Edmund Burke, who gave his sanction to their principle. In America, the admiration and the gratitude of the people were expressed in almost every conceivable form. Thanks were voted to the Farmer by political associations, by town-meetings, by grand juries. The College of New Jersey conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws. He became the favourite toast at public banquets. He was offered the membership of the choicest social clubs. On his entrance, one day, into a court-room, whither business called him, the proceedings were stopped in order to recognise his presence, and to make acknowledgment of the greatness and splendour of his services to the country. Songs were written in his praise.

The last of the Farmer’s Letters was published in February, 1768. In the following May, the new commissioners of customs arrived at Boston; in June, these commissioners, attempting to execute their odious office on John Hancock’s sloop, Liberty, were fiercely assaulted by the populace of Boston, and were driven for refuge to Castle William in Boston Harbour; whereupon Governor Bernard summoned thither General Gage with his troops from Halifax. Of these most ominous events in Boston, John Dickinson was an observer from his distant home on the Delaware; and even he, with all his deep loyalty and conscientious hesitation, was so stirred by them as then to utter what seems almost a ringing war-cry. Taking for his model Garrick’s Hearts of Oak—the air of which was then so familiar to every one—he wrote the stanzas which he christened A Song for American Freedom,—a bit of versification obviously the work of a man neither born nor bred to that business; yet being quickly caught up into universal favour under the endearing name of the Liberty Song, its manly lines soon resounded over all the land; and thenceforward, for several years, it remained the most popular political song among us.