§ 11. Benjamin Franklin, 1706–1790

The Stamp Act was an electric shock to the colonists. They expected to be ruled for the benefit of the mother country, for that was the custom of the age; but this Act they believed to be illegal, and it aroused all their Anglo-Saxon wrath at injustice. There was small inclination now to write religious poems or histories of early days. Every one was talking about the present crisis. As time passed, orations and political writings flourished; and satires and war songs had their place, followed by lengthy poems on the assured greatness and glory of America.

At the first threat of a Stamp Act, Pennsylvania had sent one of her colonists to England to prevent its passage if possible. This emissary was Benjamin Franklin, a Boston boy who had run away to Philadelphia. There he had become printer and publisher, and was widely known as a shrewd, successful business man, full of public spirit. He spent in all nearly eighteen years in England as agent of Pennsylvania and other colonies. On one of his visits home he signed the Declaration of Independence. Almost immediately he was sent to France to secure French aid in our Revolutionary struggles. Then he returned to America, and spent the five years of life that remained to him in serving his country and the people about him in every way in his power.

Such a record as this is almost enough for one man's life, but it was only a part of Franklin's work. He specialized in everything. His studies of electricity gained him honors from France and England. Harvard, Yale, Edinburgh, and Oxford gave him honorary degrees. He invented, among other things, the lightning-rod and the Franklin stove. He founded the Philadelphia Library, the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical Society. He it was who first suggested a union of colonies, and he was our first postmaster-general. His motto seems to have been, "I will do everything I can, and as well as I can."

When he was a boy in Boston, he wrote a ballad about a recent shipwreck, which sold in large numbers. "Verse-makers are usually beggars," declared his father; and the young poet wrote no more ballads, for he intended to "get on" in life. A little later, he came across an odd volume of The Spectator, and was delighted with its clear, agreeable style. "I will imitate that," he said to himself; so he took notes of some of the papers, rewrote the essays from these, and then compared his work with his model. After much of this practice, he concluded that he "might in time come to be a tolerable English writer."

The hardworking young printer had but a modest literary ambition, but it met with generous fulfilment; for if he had done nothing else, he would have won fame by his writings. These consist in great part of essays on historical, political, commercial, scientific, religious, and moral subjects. He had studied The Spectator to good purpose, for he rarely wrote a sentence that was not strong and vigorous, and, above all, clear. Whoever reads a paragraph of Franklin's writing knows exactly what the author meant to say. His first literary glory came from neither poem nor essay, but from Poor Richard's Almanac, a pamphlet which he published every autumn for twenty-five years. It was full of shrewd, practical advice on becoming well-to-do and respected and getting as much as possible out of life. The special charm of the book was that this advice was put in the form of proverbs or pithy rhymes, every one with a snap as well as a moral. "Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing." "Honesty is the best policy." "Great talkers are little doers." "Better slip with foot than tongue." "Doors and walls are fools' paper." Such was the tone of the famous little Almanac. Another of his writings, and one that is of interest to-day, is his Autobiography, which he wrote when he was sixty-five years of age. In it nothing is kept back. He tells us of his first arrival in Philadelphia, when he walked up Market Street, eating a great roll and carrying another under each arm; of his scheme for attaining moral perfection by cultivating one additional virtue each week, and of his surprise at finding himself more faulty than he had supposed! The self-revelation of the author is so honest and frank that the book could hardly help being charming, even if it had been written about an uninteresting person; but written, as it was, about a man so learned, so practical, so shrewd, so full of kindly humor as Benjamin Franklin, it is one of the most fascinating books of the century.

§ 12. Revolutionary Oratory

Franklin's Autobiography was never finished, perhaps because the Revolution was at hand and there was little time for reminiscences. The minds of men were full of the struggles of the present and the hopes of the future. Most of the oratory of the time is lost. We can only imagine it from the chance words of appreciation of those who listened to it. There was Otis, whom John Adams called "a flame of fire." There was Richard Henry Lee, the quiet thinker who blazed into the eloquence of earnestness and sincerity, the man who dared to move in Congress, "that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." There was Patrick Henry, that other Virginian, who began to speak so shyly and stumblingly that a listener fancied him to be some country minister a little taken aback at addressing such an assembly. But soon that assembly was thrilled with his ringing "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

§ 13. Political Writings

Those writers who favored peace and submission to England are no longer remembered; those who urged resistance even unto war will, in the success of that war, never be forgotten. Prominent among them was Thomas Paine, an Englishman whom the wise Benjamin Franklin met in England and induced to go to America in 1774. Two years later he published the most famous of his writings, Common Sense. This pamphlet told why its author believed in a separation from the mother country. Its clear and logical arguments were a power in bringing on the war. And when the war had come, his Crisis gave renewed courage to many a disheartened patriot. Thomas Jefferson was the author not only of the Declaration of Independence, but of many strong pamphlets that aroused men's souls to the inevitable bloodshed. It was he who, only a few days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, suggested the motto for the seal of the United States, E pluribus unum; and it is hard to see how a better one could have been found. George Washington would have smiled gravely to see himself written down as one of the lights of literature; but his Farewell Address, his letters, and his journals are not without literary value in their clearness and strength and dignity, in their noble expression of ennobling thoughts.

At the close of the Revolution, the question of the hour was how the Republic should be organized and governed. A number of political pamphlets had been written during the war; and now such writings became the main weapons of those into whose hands the formation of the Constitution had fallen. The best-known of these papers were written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. They were collected and published as The Federalist in 1788–1789, the time when the country was hesitating to adopt the Constitution. Here is an example of the straightforward, dignified, self-respecting manner in which they laid before the young nation the advantages of the proposed method of electing a President:—

The process of the election affords a moral certainty that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it, as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue.

§ 14. The "Hartford Wits"

The poets of Revolutionary times chose the same subject as the prose writers. The poem might be a ballad on some recent event of the war, a satire, or a golden vision of the greatness which, in the imagination of the poet, his country had already attained; but in one form or another the theme was ever "Our Country." A piece of literary work that falls in with the spirit of the times wins a contemporary fame whose reflection often remains much longer than the quality of the work would warrant. Among the writers of such poetry were the "Hartford Wits," as they were called, a group of Connecticut authors whose principal members were Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow.

Timothy Dwight was a grandson—and a worthy one—of Jonathan Edwards. In 1777 he was studying law, but his patriotism, and perhaps his inherited tastes, turned him into a minister; for the army needed chaplains. He was licensed to preach, and joined the Connecticut troops. Then it was that he wrote his Columbia, a patriotic song which predicted in bold, swinging metre a magnificent future for the United States. He says:—

As the day-spring unbounded, thy splendor shall flow, And earth's little kingdoms before thee shall bow: While the ensigns of union, in triumph unfurled, Hush the tumult of war and give peace to the world.

He wrote an epic, called The Conquest of Canaan; which is long, dull, and forgotten. He left many volumes and much manuscript; but the one piece of his work that has any real share in the life of to-day is his hymns, particularly his version of Psalm cxxxvii, beginning:—

I love thy kingdom, Lord, The house of thine abode.

John Trumbull's merry, good-natured face does not seem at all the proper physiognomy for a man who began life as an infant prodigy and ended it as a judge of the superior court. When he was five years old, he listened to his father's lessons to a young man who was preparing for college, and then said to his mother, "I'm going to study Latin, too." The result was that when he was seven, he passed his entrance examinations for Yale, sitting upon a man's knee, so the tradition says, because he was too little to reach the table. He was taken home, however, and did not enter college until he was thirteen. He wrote the best satire of the Revolutionary days, M'Fingal. His hero is a Tory.

From Boston in his best array Great Squire M'Fingal took his way.

The poem is a frank imitation of Hudibras, and, either luckily or unluckily for Trumbull's fame, some of his couplets are so good that they are often attributed to Butler. Among them are:—

No man e'er felt the halter draw With good opinion of the law. But optics sharp it needs, I ween, To see what is not to be seen.

The third of this group was Joel Barlow. In 1778 he graduated from Yale. His part in the Commencement programme was a poem, The Prospect of Peace. He was well qualified to write on such a subject, for he had had a fashion of slipping away to the army when his vacations came around, and doing a little fighting. Two years later, he followed the example of his friend Dwight, and became an army chaplain. After the war was over, he produced a poem, The Vision of Columbus, afterwards expanded into an epic, The Columbiad. People were so carried away with its patriotism and its sonorous phrases that they forgot to be critical, and the poem made its author famous. He is remembered now, however, by a merry little rhyme which he wrote on being served with hasty pudding in Savoy. He takes for the motto of his poem the dignified Latin sentiment, "Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci," and translates it delightfully, "He makes a good breakfast who mixes pudding with molasses." He thus apostrophizes the delicacy:—

Dear Hasty Pudding, what unpromised joy Expands my heart, to meet thee in Savoy! Doom'd o'er the world through devious paths to roam, Each clime my country and each house my home, My soul is soothed, my cares have found an end, I greet my long-lost, unforgotten friend.

Poor Barlow! aspiring to a national epic and remembered by nothing but a rhyme on hasty pudding!

§ 15. Philip Freneau, 1752–1832

In the midst of these writers of unwieldy and long-forgotten epics was one man in whom there abode a real poetic talent, Philip Freneau, born in New York. His early poems were satires and songs, often of small literary merit, indeed, but with a ring and a swing that made them almost sing themselves. The boys in the streets, as well as the soldiers in the camps, must have enjoyed shouting:—

When a certain great king, whose initial is G, Forces Stamps upon paper, and folks to drink Tea; When these folks burn his tea and stampt paper, like stubble— You may guess that this king is then coming to trouble.

When the war was over, verse that was neither epic, war song, nor satire had a chance to win appreciation. Freneau then published, in 1786, a volume of poems. In some of them there is a sincere poetic tenderness and delicacy of touch; for instance, in his memorial to the soldiers who fell at Eutaw Springs, he says:—

Stranger, their humble graves adorn; You too may fall, and ask a tear; 'Tis not the beauty of the morn That proves the evening shall be clear.

The lyric music rings even more melodiously in his Wild Honeysuckle, which ends:—

From morning suns and evening dews At first thy little being came; If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; The space between is but an hour, The frail duration of a flower.

This year 1786 was the one in which Burns published his first volume, and the year in which he wrote of his "Wee, modest, crimson-tippéd flower." Freneau was as free as Burns from the influence of Pope and his heroic couplet which had so dominated the poets of England for the greater part of the eighteenth century. He was no imitator; and he had another of the distinctive marks of a true poet,—he could find the poetic where others found nothing but the prosaic. Before his time, the American Indian, for instance, had hardly appeared in literature; Freneau was the first to see that there was something poetic in the pathos of a vanishing race. In all the rhyming of the two centuries immediately preceding 1800, there is nothing that gave such hope for the future of American poetry as some of the poems of Philip Freneau.

§ 16. Charles Brockden Brown, 1771–1810

There was hope, too, for American prose, and in a new line, that of fiction; for the Philadelphia writer, Charles Brockden Brown, published in 1798 a novel entitled Wieland. It is full of mysterious voices, murders, and threatened murders, whose cause and explanation prove to be the power of a ventriloquist. The book was called "thrilling and exciting in the highest degree;" but the twentieth-century reader cannot help wondering why the afflicted family did not investigate matters and why the tormented heroine did not get a watch-dog. Then, too, comes the thought of what the genius of Poe could have done with such material. Nevertheless, there is undeniable talent in the book, and unmistakable promise for the future. Some of the scenes, especially the last meeting between the heroine and her half-maniac brother, are powerfully drawn. Brown published several other novels, one of which, Arthur Mervyn, is valued for its vivid descriptions of a visitation of the yellow fever to Philadelphia. Like Freneau, Brown saw in the Indian good material for literature; but to him the red man was neither pathetic nor romantic,—he was simply a terrible danger of the western wilderness.

During the fifty years of the Revolutionary period, the literary spirit had first manifested itself in the practical, utilitarian prose of Franklin and the writers of The Federalist and other political pamphlets; then in the patriotic satires and epics of the Hartford Wits. Finally, in the work of both Freneau and Brown there was manifest a looking forward to literature for literature's sake, to a poetry that dreamed of the beautiful, to a prose that reached out toward the imaginative and the creative.