Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
Considering this example alongside the countless other distinct poetic genres invoked during the decade—carrier’s addresses, verse parodies, mock epics and epic fragments, ironic celebratory odes and earnest martial hymns, to name only some—reminds us that political poetry in the 1790s was never wholly reducible to politics alone but always contained a crucial aesthetic dimension distinct from a given poem’s content or message. In the case of most of the poems analyzed in this book, aesthetic elements such as verse form, genre, and allusion can be seen to heighten a poem’s political impact through the “ideology of form,” in which a work’s formal or generic qualities communicate ideological content. At the same time, the relationship between form and ideology may be seen to reflect a broader intersection of aesthetics and politics that pervaded the period. This book examines both the consistencies and the tensions that arose between the poetic and the political dimensions of political verse.22 Such intersections come into particular view in my analysis of literary warfare in the 1790s: thus, for instance, in Chapter 4, “The Language of Liberty,” I describe how Federalist poets first developed their strategy for satirizing the preferred political discourse of emerging Republicans by attending not simply to political implications alone but to tone and affect. I also examine how these same Federalists endeavored, with mixed success, to combine the aesthetic and the political, pushing the boundaries of satiric complexity and literary play to the point of compromising the clarity of their message. This tension between the aesthetic and the political is also the subject of my sixth chapter, “Mirror Images,” in which I argue that the growing popularity of engaging in literary exchanges ultimately came to undermine the political impact of political verse as a whole. For in an environment in which virtually every controversy became fodder for literary satire, and virtually every genre spawned a response composed in that identical genre, poetic warfare as a whole dwindled into a ritual that diluted the impact of any single poetic utterance, ultimately leading to what I call a literary-political stalemate in the last years of the 1790s.
The other crucial complication to the collective ambition of poets to influence the political course of the republic, of course, was the simple fact that in the real world of electoral politics a literary or satiric triumph did not necessarily prefigure a corresponding political victory. This was the reality to which Federalist poets awakened after the election of 1800, as I describe in my final chapter, “The Triumph of Democracy.” Despite having been considerably more prolific, and arguably more proficient, than their Republican counterparts, Federalist poets witnessed the tide of public opinion turn away from their party, undermining the confidence they once had in their ability to intervene in history. Facing this reality, they devised a number of strategies, first in an effort to reverse the electoral losses that began in 1800 but would continue for most of Jefferson’s presidency, and then to cope with finding themselves on what they increasingly saw as the losing side of a grand ideological struggle. In this situation, more than a few Federalist poets came to disavow their earlier claim to speak for the people at large and instead began to project in their works an alternative community of like-minded writers who were fully conscious of their status as a political minority. Yet others fought on, paralleling in verse and song the Federalist Party’s brief resurgence in popularity between the Embargo Act crisis and the War of 1812. The final political decline of the Federalists, amid the fallout from their vocal opposition to the war, also played out in the poetic public sphere: in satirizing their leaders for waging an unnecessary war, Federalist poets went further than they ever had in questioning their loyalty to the cause. Chastened by a barrage of martial ballads and inquiries into their patriotism, Federalists would abandon their political campaign, and the poetry wars of the early republic would end as they began—in the midst of intense ideological conflict made all the more severe by the presence of war.
Taken as a whole, Poetry Wars aims to highlight the importance of political poetry at virtually every point in the story of the American Revolution and the subsequent formation of the federal government and the first party system. In bringing poetry to the forefront of these developments, I hope to illuminate the relationship between culture and politics more broadly, complementing existing studies of voting patterns and party organization with a dynamic story of how political identities were formed amid shifting rhetorical strategies in response to rival arguments and unfolding events. I hope as well to help uncover a world of unspoken assumptions that governed the practice of writing and disseminating political verse during what appears in retrospect as the golden age of this cultural form. Finally, by contributing my own analyses of scores of individual poems, and by describing and referencing countless others, I hope to make these works more accessible to literary scholars and historians, in support of yet unimagined future studies of American history and culture.
Chapter 1
The Poetics of Resistance
Proclamations and Versifications: The Literary Opposition to General Gage
In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the series of laws officially called the Coercive Acts, but soon known throughout the colonies as the Intolerable Acts, intended to force the people of Massachusetts Bay into submitting to what they understood to be the rightful authority of the king and Parliament. The Port Act closed Boston to commercial shipping, the Administration of Justice Act moved criminal trials for colonial subjects to Great Britain, and the Massachusetts Government Act called for all public officials to be appointed by the Crown. Corresponding with the new emphasis on coercion was the replacement of Thomas Hutchinson as royal governor of the colony by General Thomas Gage, who simultaneously held the position of commander in chief of the king’s North American forces, and who had personally advocated a more aggressive strategy of dealing with the rebels. Arriving in New England in May 1774, Gage immediately set out to issue his orders in the manner royal vice-regents had always done, in a series of printed official proclamations. Yet in doing so, Gage unwittingly triggered a sudden and largely unprecedented literary reaction, giving rise to an as yet unremarked subgenre of early American poetry—what today would be described simply as verse parody, but what was designated at the time by the more precise term “versification.”
By the fall of 1775, when Gage’s tenure as governor came to an early and ignominious end, Gage’s proclamations had inspired numerous separate versifications, not only in Boston, where the effects of his proclamations were most directly felt, but also in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Such verse parodies ranged in length from fewer than twenty lines to several hundred, in some cases appearing as brief submissions in newspapers and in others as broadsides or longer pamphlets. They were penned by anonymous amateur versifiers whose modest skill at composing poetic meter betrayed their inexperience and likely lack of formal education, as well as by the two best-remembered poets of the Revolution, John Trumbull and Philip Freneau. More important, the versification vogue, as it was called, extended beyond Gage’s own proclamations to those issued by other vice-regents and military commanders, from Howe to Burgoyne, and in at least a few cases, were turned back against the directives of Washington and the Continental Congress by British and Loyalist wits. As one participant observed at the time, “Of late, Versification is come in vogue, and now Proclamations, Speeches, Messages, Orations, &c. seem not to be relished in plain prose, but, to please the public Taste, they must be versified.”1
This comment notwithstanding, the vogue for versifications was never simply a matter of appealing to the public taste for verse rather than prose. The near simultaneous appearance of verse parodies of Gage’s proclamations instead reflected a deeper recognition, first, of the manner in which the proclamation as a form functioned to assert political authority and, second, of the capacity of poetry—or more precisely, verse—to neutralize that power. Let us begin with the proclamation as a form of legal text: what did it mean to issue a proclamation in colonial America prior to the Revolution? In one sense, it meant little because the form had long become ubiquitous, and its purposes—not unlike proclamations issued occasionally by modern politicians—were often innocuous. Fundamentally, proclamations communicated official information to the