Revolutionary period, enlightenment
The overall goal is to study historical background and literary works of the Revolutionary period and the priod of the Enlightenment.
From the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands had fought intermittent wars for control of the American continent. Some order was brought to bear on a very confused situation with the Treaty of Parisin 1763, when England gained control over Canada, Louisiana and Florida. This undoubted English success was soon to be overshadowed by events in its most established colonies. The colonists could no longer accept the economic and political limitations which the link with England entailed. The American War of Independencebroke out in 1775, and on 4th of July 1776 the Declaration of independence was issued by George Washington, commander-in-chief of the American forces, stating that the colonies were free from their ties with Britain. The war dragged on until 1783, when the English government formally granted the colonies independence.
The leaders of the newly-independent country set about finding a political system that would guarantee the autonomy of the individual states while bringing them together in a new unified nation. Delegates from the colonies met in Philadelphia in 1787 and drew up a constitution which was mostly written by Thomas Jefferson. It was agreed to elect a president and set up two houses of parliament, the Congress and the Senate, to which all states would send their representatives. The new democracy established its federal capital on land that was bought from the states of Maryland and Virginia. It was named after George Washington,the first president of the United States, who presided over the first Congress there in 1789.
Soon after the United States came into being, France, under its republican leader, Napoleon, went to war with England. The Americans tried to remain neutral but suffered economically as trade to and from Europe was cut drastically. For ordinary people the first years of independence were years of hardship, as the newly-formed state struggled to gain recognition from the other nations of the world.
The initial period of isolation and relative poverty was gradually overcome to such an extent that, in 1823, President Monroe, in what became known as the Monroe Doctrine,stated that America would never again allow itself to be colonised by a European power.
In a very short time one of the richest continents in the world had been colonised and had given birth to a new, dynamic nation. This nation could now face the future in the knowledge that its hard-won independence was secure. With outside interference no longer a threat, it was now time to look inwards and concentrate on the building of a free, just and prosperous society.
So, the hard-fought American Revolution against Britain (1775-1783) was the first modern war of liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed to many at the time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution.
American books were harshly reviewed in England. Americans were painfully aware of their excessive dependence on English literary models. The search for a native literature became a national obsession. As one American magazine editor wrote, around 1816, “Dependence is a state of degradation fraught with disgrace, and to be dependent on a foreign mind for what we can ourselves produce is to add to the crime of indolence the weakness of stupidity.”
Cultural revolutions, unlike military revolutions, cannot be successfully imposed but must grow from the soil of shared experience. Revolutions are expressions of the heart of the people; they grow gradually out of new sensibilities and wealth of experience. It would take 50 years of accumulated history for America to earn its cultural independence and to produce the first great generation of American writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. America’s literary independence was slowed by a lingering identification with England, an excessive imitation of English or classical literary models, and difficult economic and political conditions that hampered publishing.
Revolutionary writers, despite their genuine patriotism, were of necessity self-conscious, and they could never find roots in their American sensibilities. Colonial writers of the revolutionary generation had been born English, had grown to maturity as English citizens, and had cultivated English modes of thought and English fashions in dress and behavior. Their parents and grandparents were English (or European), as were all their friends. Added to this, American awareness of literary fashion still lagged behind the English, and this time lag intensified American imitation. Fifty years after their fame in England, English neoclassic writers such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson were still eagerly imitated in America.
Moreover, the heady challenges of building a new nation attracted talented and educated people to politics, law, and diplomacy. These pursuits brought honor, glory, and financial security. Writing, on the other hand, did not pay. Early American writers, now separated from England had to face the following problems:
1) absence of modern publishers and until 1825, most American authors paid printers to publish their work;
2) lack of audience as the small cultivated audience in America wanted well-known European authors, partly out of the exaggerated respect with which former colonies regarded their previous rulers. This preference for English works was not entirely unreasonable, considering the inferiority of American output, but it worsened the situation by depriving American authors of an audience. Only journalism offered financial remuneration, but the mass audience wanted light, undemanding verse and short topical essays[31] — not long or experimental work;
3) absence of adequate legal protection, i.e. copyright laws, that became the clearest cause of literary stagnation. American printers pirating English best-sellers understandably were unwilling to pay an American author for unknown material. The unauthorized reprinting of foreign books was originally seen as a service to the colonies as well as a source of profit for printers like Franklin, who reprinted works of the classics and great European books to educate the American public. Printers everywhere in America followed his lead. There are notorious examples of pirating. Matthew Carey, an important American publisher, paid a London agent – sort of literary spy – to send copies of unbound pages, or even proofs, to him in fast ships that could sail to America in a month. Carey’s men would sail out to meet the incoming ships in the harbor and speed the pirated books into print using typesetters who divided the book into sections and worked in shifts around the clock. Such a pirated English book could be reprinted in a day and placed on the shelves for sale in American bookstores almost as fast as in England. Because imported authorized editions were more expensive and could not compete with pirated ones, the copyright situation damaged foreign authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, along with American authors. But at least the foreign authors had already been paid by their original publishers and were already well known. Americans such as James Fenimore Cooper not only failed to receive adequate payment, but they had to suffer seeing their works pirated under their noses. Cooper’s first successful book, The Spy (1821), was pirated by four different printers within a month of its appearance.
Ironically, the copyright law of 1790, which allowed pirating, was nationalistic in intent. Drafted by Noah Webster, the law protected only the work of American authors; it was felt that English writers should look out for themselves.
Bad as the law was, none of the early publishers were willing to have it changed because it proved profitable for them. Piracy starved the first generation of revolutionary American writers; not surprisingly, the generation after them produced even less work of merit. The high point of piracy, in 1815, corresponds with the low point of American writing. Nevertheless, the cheap and plentiful supply of pirated foreign books and classics in the first fifty years of the new country did educate Americans, including the first great writers, who began to make their appearance around 1825.
But still the literate American between 1765 and 1829 had great advantages over his colonial ancestors. He was the heir of an enormous expansion of printing, of the establishment of a periodical press scarcely rivaled elsewhere in the world, and of the acceptance to a degree previously unknown of the protection of literary property by copyright. None of these developments had reached its height by 1829, but their collective importance to literature can scarcely be overemphasized.
The spread of printing can be suggested by statistics. In 1810 the census found 202 paper mills in the United States. Charles Evans, who sought in his American Bibliography to list all American imprints before 1820 (and did not complete the task), discovered 35,854 items before 1800, of which 25,634 were printed between 1766 and 1799 inclusive, as against 10,220 items between 1639 and 1765. He listed 329 imprints for 1765 and 784 for 1799. Nor was this steady increase concentrated in one locality; it was, indeed, less so than is the case today. The chief center of printing prior to the Revolution was Boston; Philadelphia then held the lead until the 1820's, when it went to New York. But there were presses in all the larger towns, including those in the West, and many of them were used to print books as well as newspapers and political material. All printing was still by hand, on flat-bed presses, but improvements and industrialization were in the offing. The Columbian Iron Press, developed about 1807, substituted the principle of the fulcrum for that of the screw. Steam and revolving cylinder presses were soon to be available; and one American, William Church (1778-1853), had patented in London in 1827 a typesetting and composing machine.
The stimulation to printing was primarily political, for this was the age of party journalism. Much of the political writing by Franklin, Adams, Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Freneau first appeared in newspapers, which, despite paper shortages and military occupations, played an important role in the Revolution. The war over, newspapers multiplied; it is said that about 200 were published simultaneously by 1801. Dailies appeared in Philadelphia and New York in 1783 and 1785, when those cities had about 25,000 inhabitants. In the Hamilton-Jefferson period, party journalism swiftly came to maturity with the help of Freneau (see p. 509). Newspapers survived the Alien and Sedition Acts (see Freneau's "Stanzas to an Alien," p. 529); their place in political controversy is clarified by Jefferson's attention to them in his Second Inaugural. Bryant made his fortune as editor and part owner of the New York Evening Post, founded by Hamilton in 1801. Throughout the period, in short, news-papers increased rapidly in number (by 1829 there were probably more than a thou-sand of them), in size, and in influence.
Magazines developed more slowly. F.L. Mott has estimated that about seventy-five were begun between 1783 and 1801, several hundred more during the first third of the nineteenth century. Most of them were short-lived, but they played a large part in the rise of belles-lettres. Among those in which material reprinted in the following pages first appeared were the United States Magazine (Philadelphia, 1779, educed by H. H. Brackenridge), the New-York Magazine (1790-1797), and the North American Review (Boston, 1815-1939). Other important literary outlets included the Farmer's Weekly Museum (Walpole, N.H., 1793-1810, edited chiefly by Joseph Dennie), the Columbian Magazine (Philadelphia, 1786-1792), the American Museum (Philadelphia, 1787-1792), the Massachusetts Magazine (Boston, 1789-1796), and the Port Folio (Philadelphia, 1801-1827, edited by Dennie). These periodicals, and others like them all over the nation, provided a market for poems, essays, fiction, and literary criticism on a scale previously unknown. They were the background for the magazine world which supported Edgar Allan Poe in the next decade.
TheAmerican author, moreover, was favored after 1790 by a national copyright lawprotecting him from the unauthorized use of his work within the United States (but not, it will be noted, abroad) for a period of fourteen years, with the possibility of an extension for another fourteen. This law, based upon the similar statute passed in Great Britain in 1710 and upon legislation in Connecticut in 1783, was a great boon, although it did not protect American writers from the competition of pirated British books. International copyright was not achieved until 1891.
The book trade developed rapidly after the Revolution, and before the end of the period publishing, as now understood, was replacing the older methods of bridging the gap between author and reader. Bookstores and printing establishments trans-formed themselves into publishers, and some of the familiar names of present-day publishing appeared. The firm of Wiley was founded by Charles Wiley, a book-seller, in 1807; that of Harper by J. and J. Harper, printers, in 1817; that of Apple- ton by Daniel Appleton, who began business by keeping a general store, in 1825. Americans, nevertheless, were still largely dependent upon Great Britain for their reading; it has been estimated that American presses supplied only twenty per cent of current books in 1820, only thirty per cent in 1830.
Great challenges to seventeenth-century beliefs were posed by scientists and philosophers. It has sometimes been suggested that the “modern” period dates from 1662 and the founding of the British scientific academy known as the Royal Society.
Generally, the term “Enlightenment” is applied to the movement of intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th (the period which is often called the “Age of Reason”), especially in France and Switzerland. The Enlightenment culminated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and the political ideals of the American and French Revolutions, while its forerunners in science and philosophy included Bacon, Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and John Locke (1632-1704). Its central idea was the need for and the capacity of human reason to clear away ancient superstition, prejudice, dogma, and injustice. Thus, Kant defined enlightenment (“die Aufklärung”) as man’s emancipation from his self-incurred immaturity. These greatest scientists and philosophers saw neither conflict between their discoveries and traditionally held Christian truths nor anything heretical in arguing that the universe was an orderly system, and that by the application of reason humanity would comprehend its laws. In other words, enlightenment thinking encouraged rational scientific inquiry, humanitarian tolerance, and the idea of universal human rights.
The inevitable result of their inquiries concluded in making the universe seem more rational and benevolent than it had been represented by Puritan doctrine. It usually involved the skeptical rejection of superstition, dogma, and revelation in favor of “Deism” – a belief confined to those universal doctrines supposed to be common to all religions, such as the existence of a venerable Supreme Being as creator. So, Deists deduced the existence of a supreme being from the construction of the universe itself rather than from the Bible. People were less interested in the metaphysical wit of introspective divines than in progress of ordinary individuals as they made their way in the world. They assumed that humankind was naturally good and dwelt on neither the Fall nor the Incarnation. A harmonious universe proclaimed the beneficence of God, and Deists are a nation to revealed religion. Thus a number of seventeenth-century modes of thought (e.g. Bradford and Winthrop’s penchant for the allegorical and emblematic, seeing every natural and human event as a message from God) seemed almost medieval and decidedly quaint.
The advocates of enlightenment tended to place their faith in human progress brought about by the gradual propagation of rational principles, although their great champion Voltaire, more militant and less optimistic, waged a bitter campaign against the abuses of the ancient régime under the slogan écrasez l’infâme! (“smash the system!”).
J. Locke defined our “business” here on earth as not knowing “all things, but those which concern our conduct”. He qualified traditional belief in suggesting that we are not born with a set of innate ideas of good or evil and that the mind is rather like a blank wax tablet on which experiences are inscribed (a tabula rasa).
In English, the attitudes of the Enlightenment glued that humans should be as generous. They were not interested in theology but in humankind’s own nature. The world seemed more comprehensible and people paid less that are found in the late 18th century, in the historian Edward Gibbon and the political writers Thomas Paine and William Godwin, as well as in the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
The flourishing of philosophy and science in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 18th century is known as the Scottish Enlightenment; its leading figures included David Hume and Adam Smith.
The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.
The most memorable writing in eighteenth-century America was done by the Founding Fathers, the men who led the Revolution of 1775-1783, and who wrote the Constitution of 1789. None of them were writers of fiction, but practical philosophers, whose most typical product was the political pamphlet[32]. They both admired and were active in the European “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment”. They shared the Enlightenment belief that human intelligence (or “reason”) could understand both nature and man. Unlike the Puritans who saw man as a sinful failure, the Enlightenment thinkers were sure man could improve himself. Their wish was to create a happy society based on justice and freedom.
During this period we can trace the transference from the Puritan religious literature to the practical literature.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), whom the Scottish philosopher David Hume called America’s “first great man of letters,” embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality. He was born on Milk Street in Boston, the tenth son in a family of fifteen children. His father, Josiah, was a tallow chandler and soap boiler who came to Boston in 1682 from Ecton in Northamptonshire, and was proud of his Protestant ancestors. He married Abiah Folger, whose father was a teacher to the Amerindians. Josiah talked of offering his son Benjamin as his “tithe” to the church and enrolled him in Boston Grammar School as a preparation for the study of the ministry, but his plans were too ambitious and Benjamin was forced to leave school and work for his father. He hated his father’s occupation and threatened to run away to sea. A compromise was made, and when Benjamin was twelve he was apprenticed to his brother, a printer. He must have been a natural student of the printing trade. He loved books and reading, learned quickly, and liked to write. His brother unwittingly published Benjamin’s first essay when he printed an editorial left on his desk signed “Silence Dogood”. When his brother was imprisoned in 1722 for offending Massachusetts officials, Franklin carried on publication of the paper by himself. So, the Dogood Papers (1722) are a series of short pieces which are very funny, but full of moral advice, e.g. praising honesty, attacking drunkenness, etc.
In 1723 Franklin broke with his brother and ran away to Philadelphia It was considered to be a serious act for an apprentice, and his brother was justly indignant and angry. But the break was inevitable, for Franklin was proud and independent by nature and too clever for his brother by far. At seventeen, with little money in his pocket but already an expert printer, he proceeded to make his way in the world, subject to the usual “errata”, as he liked to call his mistakes, but confident that he could profit from lessons learned and not repeat them. His most serious error was in trusting a foolish man who wanted to be important to everyone. As a result of Governor Keith’s “favors”, Benjamin found himself alone and without employment in London in 1724. He returned to the colonies two years later.
Franklin had an uncanny instinct for success. He taught himself French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin yet was shrewd enough to know that people did not like to do business with merchants who were smarter than they. He dressed plainly and sometimes carried his own paper in a wheelbarrow through Philadelphia streets to assure future customers that he was hardworking and not above doing things for himself. By the time he was twenty-four he was the sole owner of a successful printing shop and editor and publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette. He offered his Poor Richard’s Almanac (started in 1732 and published for many years) for sale in 1733 and made it an American institution, filling it with maxims for achieving wealth and preaching hard work and thrift. It should be mentioned that almanacs, containing much useful information for farmers and sailors (e.g. about the next year’s weather, sea tides, etc) were a popular form of practical literature. Together with the Bible and the newspaper, they were the only reading matter in most Colonial households. The common sense and witty aphorisms of Franklin's popular Poor Richard's Almanac series appealed to colonial readers. So, Poor Richard’s Almanac made Franklin prosperous and well-known throughout the colonies. Never selfish, Franklin tried to help other ordinary people become successful by sharing his insights and initiating a characteristically American genre – the self-help book. Franklin made this annual book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information, interesting by creating amusing characters such as old Father Abraham and Poor Richard exhort the reader in pithy, memorable sayings. Each new edition continued a simple but realistic story about Richard, his wife and family. He also included many “sayings” about saving money and working hard. Some of these are known to most Americans today: “Lost time is never found again”, “Up sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough”, “God helps them who help themselves”.
In 1757, Franklin collected together the best of his sayings, making them into an essay called The Way to Wealth. This little book became one of the best-sellers[33] of the Western world and was translated into many languages. It originally appeared in the Almanack; Father Abraham, “a plain clean old Man, with white Locks,” quotes Poor Richard at length. “A Word to the Wise is enough,” he says. “God helps them that help themselves.” “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Poor Richard is a psychologist (“Industry pays Debts, while Despair encreaseth them”), and he always counsels hard work (“Diligence is the Mother of Good Luck”). Do not be lazy, he advises, for “One To-day is worth two tomorrow.” Sometimes he creates anecdotes to illustrate his points: “A little Neglect may breed great Mischief.... For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail.” Franklin was a genius at compressing a moral point: “What maintains one Vice, would bring up two Children.” “A small leak will sink a great Ship.” “Fools make Feasts, and wise Men eat them.”
In 1730 he married Deborah Read, the daughter of his first landlady, and they had two children. Franklin also had two illegitimate children, and Deborah took Franklin’s son William into the household. He was later to become governor of New Jersey and a Loyalist during the Revolution. Franklin addressed the first part of his Autobiography (1771)to him, which is considered to be the only real book of his. Practical yet idealistic, hard-working and enormously successful, Franklin recorded his early life in the first part of his Autobiography as an entertaining description of his life up to early manhood. The most famous section describes his scientific scheme of self-improvement. Franklin lists 13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He elaborates on each with a maxim; for example, the temperance maxim is “Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation.” A pragmatic scientist, Franklin put the idea of perfectibility to the test, using himself as the experimental subject. The second part was written in 1784 when Franklin was a tired old man and the style is more serious. Franklin now realizes the part he has played in American history and writes about himself “for the improvement of others”. Being the autobiography of “the father of the Yankees”, it is a book of great value.
To establish good habits, Franklin invented a reusable calendrical record book in which he worked on one virtue each week, recording each lapse with a black spot. His theory prefigures psychological behaviorism, while his systematic method of notation anticipates modern behavior modification. The project of self-improvement blends the Enlightenment belief in perfectibility with the Puritan habit of moral self-scrutiny.
Franklin saw early that writing could best advance his ideas, and he therefore deliberately perfected his supple prose style, not as an end in itself but as a tool. “Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar,” he advised. A scientist, he followed the Royal (scientific) Society’s 1667 advice to use “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can.”
Scientific career. During the first half of his adult life, Franklin worked as a printer of books and newspapers. But he was an energetic man with wide interests. Before he retired from business at the age of forty-two, Franklin had founded a library, invented a stove, established a fire company, subscribed to an academy that was to become the University of Pennsylvania, and served as secretary to the American Philosophical Society. It was his intention when he retired to devote himself to public affairs and his lifelong passion for the natural sciences, especially the phenomena of sound, vapors, earthquakes, and electricity. As a scientist, he wrote important essays on electricity which were widely read and admired in Europe. His first observations on electricity were published in London in 1751 and, despite his disclaimers in the Autobiography, brought him the applause of British scientists. We can admit that science was Franklin’s great passion, the only thing about which Franklin was not ironic. His inquiring mind was challenged most by the mechanics of the ordinary phenomena of the world, and he was convinced that the mind’s rational powers would enable him to solve riddles that had puzzled humankind for centuries. Franklin believed that people were naturally innocent, that all the mysteries that charmed the religious mind could be explained to out advantage and that education, properly undertaken, would transform our lives and set us free from the tyrannies of church and monarchy. Franklin had no illusions about the errata of humankind, but his metaphor suggests that we can change and alter our past in a way that the word sins does not. All in all, his many inventions, his popularity as a writer and his diplomatic activity in support of the American Revolution made him world-famous in his own lifetime.
Although Franklin wrote a great deal, almost all of his important works are quite short. He invented one type of short prose which greatly influenced the development of a story-telling form in America, called the “hoax”[34], or the “tall tale” (later made famous by Mark Twain). A hoax is funny because it is so clearly a lie. In his Wonders of Nature in America, Franklin reports “the grand leap of the whale up the falls of Niagara which is esteemed by all who have seen it as one of the finest spectacles in Nature”. During the Revolution, he developed this form of humor into a powerful propaganda tool for American independence.
Political career. Franklin’s remaining years were spent at the diplomatic table in London, Paris and Philadelphia, where his gift for irony served him well. For he was a born diplomat, detached, adaptable, witty, urbane, charming, and clever and of the slightly more than forty years left to him after his retirement, more than half were spent abroad. In 1757 he went to England to represent the colonies and stayed for five years, returning in 1763. It was in England in 1768 that Franklin first noted his growing sense of alienation and the impossibility of compromise with the homeland. Parliament can make all laws for the colonies or none, he said. When he returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, he was chosen as a representative to the Second Continental Congress, and he served on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. In October 1776, he was appointed minister to France, where he successfully negotiated a treaty of allegiance and became something of a cult hero. In 1781 he was a member of the American delegation to the Paris peace conference, and he signed the Treaty of Paris, which brought the Revolutionary War to an end. Franklin protested his too-long stay in Europe and returned to Philadelphia in 1785, serving as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In his later years, he was president of an antislavery association. One of his last efforts was to promote universal public education.
Writer, printer, publisher, scientist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was the most famous and respected private figure of his time. He was the first great self-made man in America, a poor democrat born in an aristocratic age that his fine example helped to liberalize. Despite his prosperity and fame, Franklin never lost his democratic sensibility. When he died in 1790, he was one of the most beloved Americans. Twenty thousand people attended his funerals.
This hero of the eighteenth century, however, has not universally charmed our own. For a number of readers, Franklin has been identified as a garrulous but insensitive man of the world, too adaptable for a man of integrity and too willing to please. For example, D.H. Lawrence is only one of a number of Franklin’s critics who have charged him with insensitivity and indifference to the darker recess of the soul. There is no question but that Franklin has been reduced by his admirers – the hero of those who seek only the way to wealth. But such single-mindedness does no do justice to Franklin’s complexity. A reading of his letters will serve as a proper antidote; for the voice we find there is fully alert to the best and worst in all of humankind.
On the whole, the writings of Franklin show the Enlightenment spirit in America at its best and most optimistic. His style is quite modern and, even today his works are a joy to read. Although he strongly disagreed with the opinions of the Puritans, his works show a return to their “plain style”. At the same time, there is something “anti-literary” about Franklin. He had no liking for poetry and felt that writing should always have a practical purpose.
The period just before the start of the Revolution saw a flood of political journalism. Political writings in a democracy had to be clear to appeal to the voters. And to have informed voters, universal education was promoted by many of the founding fathers. Literary life was the proliferation of newspapers. More of them were read in America during the Revolution than anywhere else in the world. Immigration also mandated a simple style. Clarity was vital to a newcomer, for whom English might be a second language.
Despite this fact, political journalism was produced mostly in the form of pamphlets rather than newspapers, because the pamphlet was cheap to publish and the author, if he wished, did not have to give his name. So, pamphlets became the most popular form of political literature of the day. Over 2,000 of them were published during the Revolution. They thrilled patriots and threatened loyalists, filled the role of drama, as they were often read aloud in public to excite audiences. American soldiers read pamphlets aloud in their camps; British Loyalists threw them into public bonfires.
James Otis (1725-1783) was one of the most passionate and effective protectors of American rights during the 1760s, but his bright star dimmed during his lifetime and remains so today. He was born in West Barnstable on Cape Cod, the son of a prominent Massachusetts political figure with the same name. Young Otis graduated from Harvard College in 1743, practiced law briefly in Plymouth, and in 1750, settled in Boston, where he became a highly respected lawyer.
At the beginning of his career, Otis was a political conservative and was rewarded for his loyalty in 1756, with an appointment as an advocate general in the vice admiralty court. Among his duties was the responsibility to prosecute smugglers. Many New England merchants had resorted to illegal activities in order to avoid the onerous Acts of Trade that governed commerce throughout the British Empire; the Crown attempted to crack down on the violators and had introduced a new legal instrument – the writs of assistance – to aid in the process. Those writs were general search warrants that enabled customs officials to enter business and homes in the hope of finding vaguely defined contraband. Many colonists, including Otis, were deeply concerned about what they regarded as an unconstitutional practice.
Otis's conversion from a conservative royal employee to radical critic is not explained solely in terms of constitutional scruples. In 1761, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, Sir Francis Bernard, had selected Thomas Hutchinson to be the new Chief Justice of the colony’s Superior Court; the candidacy of James Otis Sr. was bypassed.
Fueled both by principle and a desire for revenge, Otis resigned his position in 1761, and accepted a call from Boston merchants to represent them in a fight to prevent the renewal of authority for the writs of assistance. The case was heard in February and Otis, in the fashion of the day, delivered an eloquent five-hour argument in which he maintained that the writs were a violation of the colonists’ natural rights and that any act of Parliament that abrogated those rights was null and void. He stated in part:
A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege. Custom-house officers may enter our houses when they please; we are commanded to permit their entry. Their menial servants may enter, may break locks, bars, and everything in their way; and whether they break through malice or revenge, no man, no court may inquire.
In attendance at court that day was a young attorney, John Adams, who would later cite this moment as the first scene in the first act of resistance to oppressive British policies.
Otis lost the case; the writs of assistance were renewed. However, the matter had been brought to popular attention and few officials in the future were willing to incur public wrath by employing the orders. Otis became an instant celebrity and a month later was elected to a seat in the General Court (legislature). As time passed and the list of American grievances against the Crown grew, Otis played an ever more prominent role in advancing the colonists' interests. In 1764, he headed the Massachusetts committee of correspondence. He also spoke and wrote widely, and won special praise for The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in which he made the case against Parliamentary taxation of the colonies. The following year he was a leading figure at the Stamp Act Congress in New York City.
Otis’s open advocacy of American rights grated on many officials' nerves; his election to the speakership of the General Court in 1766, was voided by the governor’s veto. Undeterred, Otis teamed with Samuel Adams to confront the next crisis: enforcement of the Townshend Duties in 1767. The firebrand duo drafted a circular letter to enlist the other colonies in planned resistance to the new taxes.
James Otis was one early propagandist who used violent language more than reason in his attacks on British policies. The Rudiments of Latin Prosody (1760). Otis published the first of two treatises on prosody, and his alma mater, Harvard, eventually adapted it as a textbook. A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives (1762) is the first political publication by Otis. Here he uses an example of an expenditure not sanctioned by the colonial legislature as the foundation of his theory that taxes can be charged only by a representative government. In effect, he summarizes the argument that would have a central place in Revolutionary rhetoric. The pamphlet “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (1764) sets down another important philosophy underpinning the Revolutionary debate: it asserts that rights are not derived from human institutions, but from nature and God. Thus, government does not exist to please monarchs, but to promote the good of the entire society. Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists (1765) expands the author's argument from The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. He furthers the notion of natural rights by linking it to the theory of equal representation. In this year he also authors the pamphlets Vindication of the British Colonies and Brief Remarks on the Defence of the Halifax Libel, Otis's last. Contradicting his earlier statements, Otis now is pleased to grant Parliament complete authority over the colonies. Scholars have settled on two explanations for his drastic reversal: Otis either temporarily became mentally ill, or he intended to use these pieces to defend himself against charges of treason.
In 1769, at the height of his popularity and influence, Otis was pulled from the public stage. He had infuriated a Boston custom-house official with a vicious newspaper attack; the official beat Otis on his head with a cane. For the remainder of his life, Otis was subject to long bouts of mental instability. He was unable to participate in public affairs and spent most of his time wandering through the streets of Boston, enduring the taunts of a populace that had quickly forgotten his contributions. Otis was struck and killed by lightning in May 1783.
Other pro-independence writers included John Dickinson (1732-1808) and John Adams (1735-1826).
John Adams (1735-1826) later became the second President of the United States. John Adams was born the son of a farmer nearby Braintree (now a part of Quincy, Massachusetts). He graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1755. He taught school for a short time in Worcester, but the role of the teacher and the preacher were too closely joined for his taste and he was made uncomfortable by association with any “frigid” Calvinism. He took up the study of law, instead, and was admitted to the Boston bar in 1758. He met his future wife, Abigail Smith, the daughter of a wealthy Congregational minister from Weymouth, Massachusetts, the following years. They were married on October 25, 1764, and remained partners in marriage until Abigail’s death fifty-four years later.
Although John Adams preferred a country to a city law practice and treasured his Braintree farm, he found it impossible to support a growing family (the Adamses had four children) on a country clientele. In 1768 they moved to Boston. John Adams’s earlier opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 and his defense of Massachusetts radicals like John Hancock identified him as one who would support the cause of independence, and in June 1774 he was elected as a Massachusetts delegate to the first Congress of the colonies, scheduled to meet in Philadelphia, later known as the First Continental Congress.
He left Braintree on August 10, and for the next twenty-six years, ten of them spent abroad, he was a famous and sometimes controversial figure in American public life. He was elected vice president for two terms (1788 and 1792) and president in 1796. After losing the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, he retired to Braintree at last, anxious to lead the Arcadian life he spoke so wistfully about while holding public office. It was Abigail, as usual, who oversaw the daily life of the farm: she was always an astute manager of money, property, animals, and people.
From the time that John Adams left Massachusetts in 1774 until he returned from Paris in 1783, more than three hundred letters passed between this couple. They were lovingly saved and many of them were published by their grandson in the middle of the nineteenth century. They provide not only an extraordinary document of a long and happy marriage, but a vivid portrait of a nation seeking his identity.
The greatest pamphlet-writer of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine (1737-1809), was born in England, the son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, and did not come to America until he was thirty-seven years old. Until he was thirteen he went to grammar school and then was apprenticed in his father’s corset shop. At nineteen he ran away from home to go to sea. From 1757 and 1774 he was a corset maker, a tobacconist and grocer, a schoolteacher, and an exciseman (a government employee who taxed goods). His efforts to organize he exisemen and make Parliament raise their salary was unprecedented. He lost his job when he admitted he had stamped as examined goods that had not been opened. His first wife died less than a year after his marriage, and he was separated from his second wife after three years. Scandals about his private life and questions about his integrity while employed as an exciseman provided his critics with ammunition for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, Paine was a remarkable man, self-taught and curious about everything, from the philosophy of aw to natural science.
At the age of thirty-seven, he met Benjamin Franklin in London and was persuaded to go to America. When he arrived in Philadelphia with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, recommending him as an “ingenious, worthy young man”, he had already had a remarkably full life. In Philadelphia he seemed to find himself as a journalist, and he made his way quickly in that city, first as a spokesman against slavery, then as the anonymous author of Common Sense (1776), the first pamphlet published in this country to urge immediate independence from Britain and thus got historically important recognition in American history. It should be mentioned that even Paine’s early years prepared him to be a supporter of the Revolution. The discrepancy between his high intelligence and the limitations imposed on him by poverty and caste made him long for a new social order. He once said that a sermon he heard at the age of eight impressed him with the cruelty inherent in Christianity and made him a rebel forever.
Painesold over 100,000 copies of Common Sense in the first three months of its publication. All in all almost half a million copies were sold, and its authorship (followed by the charge of traitor) could not be kept a secret for long. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Paine wrote, voicing the idea of American exceptionalism still strong in the United States — that in some fundamental sense, since America is a democratic experiment and a country theoretically open to all immigrants, the fate of America foreshadows the fate of humanity at large. Its clear thinking and exciting language quickly untied American feelings against England. He seemed to express what the readers themselves had been secretly thinking: “There is something absurd in supposing a continent (America) to be perpetually governed by an island (Britain)”.
Paine enlisted in the Revolutionary Army and served as an aide-de-camp in battles in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He followed his triumph of Common Sense with the first of sixteen pamphlets titled Crisis (1776). The Crisis I appeared the day after the American leader, General George Washington, was defeated in the Battle of Long Island. It contains the most famous passage in all of Paine’s writings: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country… Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered”. This first Crisis paper was read to Washington’s troops at Trenton and did much to shore up the spirits of the Revolutionary soldiers. Between 1776 and 1783, he issued a series of such pamphlets.
Paine received a number of political appointments as rewards for his services as a writer for the American cause, but he missed his privileges and lost the most lucrative offices. He was too indiscreet and hot tempered for public employment. In 1787 he returned to England, determined to get financial assistance to construct an iron bridge for which he had devised plans. But it came to nothing.
Paine was also active in the French Revolution and in England he wrote a famous defense of that revolution too: The Rights of Man (1791-1792), which was recognized as his second most successful work. This work was an impassioned plea against hereditary monarchy, the traditional institution Paine never tired of arguing against. He was charged with treason and fled to France, where he was made a citizen and lionized as a spokesman for revolution. The horrors of the French Revolution, however, brought home to Paine the fact that the mere overthrow of monarchy did not usher in light and order. When he protested the execution of Louis XVI, he was accused of sympathy with the Crown and imprisoned. He was saved from trial by the American Ambassador, James Monroe, who offered him an American citizenship and safe passage back to New York.
Paine spent the last years of his life in New York City and in New Rochelle, New York. They were unhappy, impoverished years, and his reputation suffered enormously as a result of The Age of Reason (1794). Paine’s attempt to define his beliefs was viewed as an attack on Christianity and, by extension, on conventional society. He was ridiculed and despised. Even George Washington, who had supported Paine’s early writing, thought English criticism of him was “not a bad thing”. Paine had clearly outlived his time. He was buried on his farm at New Rochelle after his request for a Quaker grave site was refused. Ten years later an enthusiastic admirer exhumed his bones with the intention of having him reburied in England. The admirer’s plan came to nothing, and the whereabouts of Paine’s grave is, at present, unknown.
Paine’s great gift as a stylist was “plainness”. He said he needed no “ceremonious expressions”. “It is my design,” he wrote, “to make those who can scarcely read understand,” to put his arguments in a language “as plain as the alphabet”, and to shape everything “to fit the powers of thinking and the turn of language to the subject, so as to bring out a clear conclusion that shall hit the point in question and nothing else”.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was born at Shadwell, in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia. His mother, Jane Randolph, came from one of the most distinguished families in Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a county official and surveyor. He made the first accurate map of Virginia, something of which Jefferson was always proud. When his father died, T. Jefferson was only fourteen. He was left with 2,750 acres of land, and he himself added to this acreage until he died; at one time he owned almost ten thousand acres. Jefferson tells us in his Autobiography that his father’s education had been “quite neglected” but that he was always “eager after information” and determined to improve himself. In 1760 Jefferson entered William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he mastered Latin and Greek, played the violin respectably, and became a skilled horseman. He was tall and a bit awkward looking, but a good companion. Williamsburg was the capital of Virginia as well as a college town, and Jefferson was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of three men who strongly influenced his life: Governor Francis Fauquier, a fellow of the Royal Society; George Wythe, one of the best teachers in law in the country; and Dr. William Small, an emigrant from Scotland who taught mathematics and philosophy and who introduced Jefferson “to the invigorating realm of the Scottish Enlightenment”, especially the work of Francis Hutcheson, author of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), and Lord Kames (Henry Home), author of Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751). Jefferson flourished in Williamsburg, and it is hard to imagine a city in America where his natural interests and talents could have been more sympathetically encouraged.
Jefferson stayed on in Williamsburg to read law after graduation and was admitted to the bar. In 1769 he was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and began a distinguished career in the legislature. In 1774 he wrote an influential and daring pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America, denying all parliamentary authority over America and arguing that ties to the British monarchy were voluntary and not irrevocable. Jefferson’s reputation as a writer preceded him to Philadelphia, where he was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and on June 11, 1776, he was elected to join Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston in drafting a declaration of independence. Although committee members made suggestions, the draft was very much Jefferson’s own. That’s why he is considered to be the chief author of the Declaration of Independence. Thanks to his beautiful style, the most important document in the political history of the United States is also a fine work of literature. Although it was written during a difficult time in the war, the Declaration is surprisingly free from emotional appeals. It is a clear and logical statement of why America wanted its independence. The original draft of the Declaration of Independence was clear enough, but committee’s modifications made it even simpler. Jefferson made no attempt to be original. Rather, he built upon the ideas of such philosophers as John Locke.
The Declaration was revised eighty-six times before it was finally signed on July 4, 1776. And Jefferson was unhappy with the changes made by Congress to his draft, and rightly so; for congressional changes went contrary to some of his basic arguments. Jefferson wished to place the British people on record as the ultimate cause of the Revolution, because the tolerated a corrupt parliament and king; and he wished to include a strong statement against slavery. Congress tolerated neither passage. Jefferson was justified, however, in asking that he be remembered as the author of the Declaration. It was a dangerous but glorious opportunity.
Whether as the result of these frustrations or merely Jefferson’s wish to be nearer his family, he left the Congress in September 1776, and entered the Virginia House of Delegates. In 1779 he was elected governor, and although reelected the following year, Jefferson’s term of office came to an ignominious end when he resigned. After the British captured Richmond in 1781, Jefferson and his legislature moved to Charlottesville, and he and the legislators barely escaped imprisonment when the pursuing British army descended on them at Monticello. Jefferson’s resignation and the lack of preparations for the defense of the city were held against him, and it was some time before he regained the confidence of Virginians.
From 1781 to 1784 Jefferson withdrew from public life and remained at Monticello, completing his only book, one of the best descriptions of early America, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784-1785). Although he himself was a Southerner and owned slaves at one time, he attacked the slavery system, saying that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free”.
In 1784 he was appointed minister to France and served with Benjamin Franklin on the commission that signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War. He returned to Monticello in 1789, and in 1790 Washington appointed him the first secretary of state under the newly adopted Constitution. After three years he announced his plans for retirement once again and withdrew to Monticello, where he rotated his crops and built a grist mill. But Jefferson’s political blood was too thick for retirement, and in 1796 he ran for the office of president, losing to John Adams and taking the office of vice president instead. In 1800 he was elected president, the first to be inaugurated in Washington. He named Benjamin Latrobe surveyor of public buildings, and he worked with Latrobe in planning a great city.
When Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1809, he knew that this time his public life was over. For the final seventeen years of his life he kept a watchful eye on everything that grew in Monticello. But Jefferson was never far from the world. He rose every morning to attack his voluminous correspondence. The Library of Congress holds more than fifty-five thousand Jefferson’s manuscripts and letters, and the most recent edition of his writings will run to sixty volumes. Jefferson left no treatise on political philosophy and, in a sense, was no political thinker. He was always more interested in the practical consequences of ideas. He remained an agrarian aristocrat all his life, and it is to the liberty of mind and the values of the land that he always returned.
Jefferson died a few hours before John Adams on the Fourth of July, 1826.
So, we can conclude that Jefferson was deeply influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. He believed that man did not have to depend on God to improve the world, and should use his own wisdom to do the improving by himself. As a typical Enlightenment thinker, Jefferson believed that all humanity is naturally good: “Nature has implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct”. On the other hand, he was afraid that the commercial pressure of city life would destroy his goodness. Only “those who labor in the earth”, could be the basis of a truly democratic society. Jefferson saw another threat to American democracy in the thinking of the “Federalists”, who favored a strong central government for the new American republic (some Federalists even wanted to make George Washington king!). The Federalists wanted a form of government and society which would not be easily upset. Jefferson, however, felt the people should be able to change the form of their society whenever they thought it necessary. He even accepted the idea that a new American revolution might happen someday: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical”.
Jefferson was a homely aristocrat in manner of life and personal tastes; he distrusted all rulers and feared the rise of an industrial proletariat, but more than any of his eminent contemporaries, he trusted the common man, if measurably enlightened and kept in rural virtue.
In Revolutionary America, both prose and poetry had a political or “practical” purpose. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was perhaps the best poet of his time, the poet of the American Revolution. He had all the advantages that wealth and social position could bestow, and the Freneau household in Manhattan was frequently visited by well-known writers and painters. Freneau received a good education at the hands of tutors and at fifteen entered the sophomore class at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). There he became fast friends with his roommate, James Madison, a future president, and a classmate, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who was to become a successful novelist. In their senior year Freneau and Brackenridge composed an ode[35] on The Rising Glory of America, and Brackenridge read the poem at commencement. It establishes early in Freneau’s career his recurrent vision of a glorious future in which America would fulfill the collective of humankind:
Paradise anew
Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost,
No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow,
No tempting serpent to allure the soul
From native innocence. … The lion and the lamb
In mutual friendship linked, shall browse the shrub,
And timorous deer with softened tigers stray
O’er mead, or lofty hill, or grass plain…
He was also a political journalist, and this deeply influenced his early poetry. From the beginning, he wrote in the cause of American independence with strong patriotic feeling. In his poem Pictures of Columbus (1771), he mixed gloomy descriptions of nature with sharp attacks on British tyranny.
For a short time Freneau taught school and hoped to make a career as a writer, but it was an impractical wish. When he was offered a position as a secretary on a plantation in the West Indies in 1776, he sailed to Santa Cruz and remained there almost three years. It was in that country, where “Sweet orange groves in lonely valleys rise,” that Freneau wrote some of his most sensuous lyrics, but as tells us in To Sir Toby, he could not talk of “blossoms” and an “endless spring” forever in a land that abound in poverty and misery and where the owners grew wealthy on a slave economy.
Freneau incorporated the new stirrings of European Romanticism and escaped the imitativeness and vague universality of the Hartford Wits. The key to both his success and his failure was his passionately democratic spirit combined with an inflexible temper. The Hartford Wits, all of them undoubted patriots, reflected the general cultural conservatism of the educated classes. Freneau set himself against this holdover of old Tory attitudes, complaining of “the writings of an aristocratic, speculating faction at Hartford, in favor of monarchy and titular distinctions.” Although Freneau received a fine education and was as well acquainted with the classics as any Hartford Wit, he embraced liberal and democratic causes. From a Huguenot (radical French Protestant) background, Freneau fought as a militiaman during the Revolutionary War, when he wrote about American patriots killed in battle: “None grieved in such a cause to die”.
In 1778 he returned home and enlisted as a seaman on a blockade runner. Two years later he himself fought on an American ship and was captured and imprisoned on the British ship Scorpion, anchored in New York harbor. He was treated brutally, and when he was exchanged from the hospital ship Hunter his family feared for his life. He wrote about this experience in his poem The British Prison Ship (1781), which is a bitter condemnation of the cruelties of the British as his own experience, who wished “to stain the world with gore”:
Hunger and thirst to work our woe combine,
And mouldy bread, and flesh of rotten swine.
This piece and other revolutionary works, including Eutaw Springs, American Liberty, A Political Litany, A Midnight Consultation, and George the Third’s Soliloquy, brought him fame as the “Poet of the American Revolution.”
Freneau was to spend ten more years of his life at sea, first as a master of a merchant ship in 1784, and again in 1803, but immediately after he regained his health, he moved to Philadelphia to work in the post office, and it was in that city that he gained his reputation as a satirist, journalist, and poet.
Freneau edited a number of journals during his life, always mindful of the great cause of democracy. His popular poems, published in newspapers for the average reader, regularly celebrated American subjects. The Virtue of Tobacco concerns the indigenous plant, a mainstay of the southern economy, while The Jug of Rum celebrates the alcoholic drink of the West Indies, a crucial commodity of early American trade and a major New World export. Common American characters lived in The Pilot of Hatteras, as well as in poems about quack doctors and bombastic evangelists.
Freneau commanded a natural and colloquial style appropriate to a genuine democracy. In his last and best phase, he turned to poetry about nature, where he rose to refined neoclassic lyricism in often-anthologized works such as The Wild Honey Suckle (1786), which evokes a sweet smelling native shrub. In this poem the flower becomes a symbol for unnoticed beauty which quickly passes away. The last lines of the poem compare the shortness of human life to that of the flower:
For when you die you are the same;
The space between, is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.
But to Freneau, “death is no more than un