A History of American Literature. Percy Holmes Boynton
foreign dominions on Britain’s side,
But the gods were confounded and struck with surprise,
And Vulcan could hardly believe his own eyes!
For (such was the purpose and guidance of fate)
Her foreign dominions diminish’d her weight—
By which it appeared, to Britain’s disaster,
Her foreign possessions were changing their master.
Then as he replac’d them, said Jove with a smile—
“Columbia shall never be rul’d by an isle—
But vapours and darkness around her shall rise,
And tempests conceal her a while from our eyes;
“So locusts in Egypt their squadrons display,
And rising, disfigure the face of the day;
So the moon, at her full, has a frequent eclipse,
And the sun in the ocean diurnally dips.
“Then cease your endeavors, ye vermin of Britain—
(And here, in derision, their island he spit on)
’T is madness to seek what you never can find,
Or think of uniting what nature disjoin’d;
“But still you may flutter awhile with your wings,
And spit out your venom, and brandish your stings,
Your hearts are as black, and as bitter as gall,
A curse to yourselves, and a blot on the Ball.”
After the successful completion of the war it was only natural that Americans in their rejoicing should imagine the glorious future that awaited their new independence. The more vivid their imaginations were, the more splendid were the prophecies they indulged in. As we read over the records of their lofty hopes we are reminded of commencement oratory; and the likeness is not unreal, for these post-Revolution poets were in fact very like eager college graduates, diploma in hand, looking forward to vague but splendid careers. It was in these poems too that the germs of Fourth of July oratory first took root—the oratory described by James Fenimore Cooper in his “Home as Found” (chap. xxi):
There were the usual allusions to Greece and Rome, between the republics of which and that of this country there exists some such affinity as is to be found between a horse-chestnut and a chestnut horse, or that of mere words; and a long catalogue of national glories that might very well have sufficed for all republics, both of antiquity and of our own time. But when the orator came to speak of the American character, and particularly of the intelligence of the nation, he was most felicitous, and made the largest investments in popularity. According to his account of the matter, no other people possessed a tithe of the knowledge, or a hundredth part of the honesty and virtue of the very community he was addressing; and after laboring for ten minutes to convince his hearers that they already knew everything, he wasted several more in trying to persuade them to undertake further acquisitions of the same nature.
These elephantine poems were written each in several “books,” to each one of which was prefixed an outline which, in the language of the day, was called “the argument.” Here is a part of the outline for Book VII of Timothy Dwight’s “Greenfield Hill” (1794):
Happiness of U. S. contrasted to Eastern Despotism. Universal Prevalence of Freedom. Unfortified, and therefore safe, state of U. S. Influence of our state of Society on the Mind. Public Property employed for the Public Benefit. Penal Administrations improved by Benevolence. Policy enlarges its scope. Knowledge promoted. Improvements in Astronomical and other Instruments of Science. Improvements of the Americans, in Natural Philosophy—Poetry—Music—and Moral Science. State of the American Clergy. Manners refined. Artificial Manners condemned. American Women. Cultivation advanced. Other Nations visit this country, and learn the nature, and causes, of our happiness. Conclusion.
And here is a part of the argument to Book IX of Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad,” in which he demonstrates that the present government of America is a culmination of all human progress:
… the ancient and modern states of the arts and of society, Crusades, Commerce, Hanseatic League, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, Herschel, Descartes, Bacon, Printing Press, Magnetic Needle, Geographic Discoveries, Federal System in America.
Freneau had shared all this prophetic enthusiasm, and had expressed it even before the war, partly in an actual commencement poem on “The Rising Glory of America” and partly in a series of eighteen “Pictures of Columbus.” Just after graduation he had written:
I see, I see
A thousand Kingdoms rais’d, cities and men
Num’rous as sand upon the ocean shore;
Th’ Ohio then shall glide by many a town
Of note; and where the Mississippi stream
By forests shaded now runs weeping on,
Nations shall grow, and States not less in fame
Than Greece and Rome of old; we too shall boast
Our Alexanders, Pompeys, heroes, kings,
That in the womb of time yet dormant lye
Waiting the joyful hour of life and light.
After the war, however, he did not rejoin the increasing choir who were singing this kind of choral. His most interesting bit of prophecy, which must have seemed to his contemporaries to be a piece of the airiest fancy, has been amazingly verified more than a century after he wrote it. This is “The Progress of Balloons,” written in the jaunty tone of “The Political Balance”:
The stagemen, whose gallopers scarce have the power
Through the dirt to convey you ten miles in an hour,
When advanc’d to balloons shall so furiously drive
You’ll hardly know whether you’re dead or alive.
The man who at Boston sets out with the sun,
If the wind should be fair, may be with us at one,
At Gunpowder Ferry drink whiskey at three
And at six be at Edentown, ready for tea.
(The machine shall be order’d, we hardly need say,
To travel in darkness as well as by day)
At Charleston by ten he for sleep shall prepare,
And by twelve the next day be the devil knows where.
… . … .
If Britain should ever disturb us again,
(As they threaten to do in the next George’s reign)
No doubt they will play us a set of new tunes,
And pepper us well from their fighting balloons.
… . … .
Such wonders as these from balloons shall arise—
And the giants of old that assaulted the skies
With their Ossa on Pelion, shall freely confess
That all they attempted was nothing to this.
This, of course, was newspaper poetry, and Freneau, for long years of his life, was a newspaper man. Even his lines “To Sir Toby,” a slaveholding sugar-planter in Jamaica, spirited as they are, are in effect an open letter in protest against human slavery, and they were printed in the National Gazette in 1792.
The really poetical work of Freneau, however, which entitles him to an attention greater than that for his fellows, had nothing to do with political or