I. A GENERAL VIEW

The Three Stages.—In the intellectual process of the American Revolution, are to be observed three well defined stages of development on the part of the men who began and carried through that notable enterprise. The first stage—extending from the spring of 1763 to the spring of 1775—represents the noble anxiety which brave men must feel when their political safety is imperilled, this anxiety, however, being deepened in their case by a sincere and even a passionate desire, while roughly resisting an offensive ministerial policy, to keep within the bounds of constitutional opposition, and neither to forsake nor to forfeit that connection with the mother-country which they then held to be among the most precious of their earthly possessions. The second stage—extending from the spring of 1775 to the early summer of 1776—represents a rapidly spreading doubt, and yet at first no more than a doubt, as to the possibility of their continuing to be free men without ceasing to be English colonists. This doubt, of course, had been felt by not a few of them long before the day of the Lexington and Concord fights; but under the appalling logic of that day of brutality, it became suddenly weaponed with a power which mere words never had,—the power to undo swiftly, in the hearts of a multitude of liegemen, the tie of race, the charm of an antique national tradition, the loyalty, the love, and the pride of centuries. The third stage—extending from the early summer of 1776 to the very close of the whole struggle—represents a final conviction, at least on the part of a working majority of the American people, that it would be impossible for them to preserve their political rights and at the same time to remain inside the British Empire,—this conviction being also accompanied by the resolve to preserve those rights whether or no, and at whatsoever cost of time, or effort, or pain.

Of course, the intellectual attitude of the Loyalists of the Revolution—always during that period an immense and a very conscientious minority—correlated to that of the Revolutionists in each one of these three stages of development: in the first stage, by a position of qualified dissent as to the gravity of the danger and as to the proper method of dealing with it; in the second and third stages, by a position of unqualified dissent, and of implacable hostility, as regards the object and motive and method of the opposition which was then conducted by their more masterful fellow-countrymen.

The Predominant Note.—The chief trait of American literature during the period now under view is this: its concern with the problems of American society, and of American society in a peculiar condition—aroused, inflammable, in a state of alarm for its own existence, but also in a state of resolute combat for it. The literature which we are thus to inspect is not, then, a literature of tranquillity, but chiefly a literature of strife, or, as the Greeks would have said, of agony; and, of course, it must take those forms in which intellectual and impassioned debate can be most effectually carried on. The literature of our Revolution has almost everywhere the combative note; its habitual method is argumentative, persuasive, appealing, rasping, retaliatory; the very brain of man seems to be in armour; his wit is in the gladiator’s attitude of offence and defence. It is a literature indulging itself in grimaces, in mockery, in scowls: a literature accented by earnest gestures meant to convince people, or by fierce blows meant to smite them down. In this literature we must not expect to find art used for art’s sake.

Our next discovery is the rather notable one that such a period actually had a literary product very considerable in amount. Even in those perturbed years between 1763 and 1783, there was a large mass of literature produced in America. More than with most other epochs of revolutionary strife, our epoch of revolutionary strife was a strife of ideas: a long warfare of political logic; a succession of annual campaigns in which the marshalling of arguments not only preceded the marshalling of armies, but often exceeded them in impression upon the final result. An epoch like this, therefore,—an epoch in which nearly all that is great and dear in man’s life on earth has to be argued for, as well as to be fought for, and in which ideas have a work to do quite as pertinent and quite as effective as that of bullets,—can hardly fail to be an epoch teeming with literature, with literature, of course, in the particular forms suited to the purposes of political co-operation and conflict.

We shall be much helped by keeping in mind the distinction between two classes of writings then produced among us: first, those writings which were the result of certain general intellectual interests and activities apart from the Revolutionary movement, and, secondly, those writings which were the result of intellectual interests and activities directly awakened and sustained by that movement. The presence of the first class we discover chiefly in the earlier years of this period, before the Revolutionary idea had become fully developed and fully predominant; and, again, in the later years of the period, when, with the success of the Revolution assured, the Revolutionary idea had begun to recede, and men’s minds were free to swing again toward the usual subjects of human concern, particularly toward those which were to occupy them after the attainment of independence and of peace.

Literary Centres.—We shall find, within the first decade of this period and before its culmination into the final violence of the Revolutionary controversy, the beginnings of a new and a truer life in America. Of this new literary life there were, in general, two chief centres, one in the New England, one in the Middle Colonies. The New England literary centre was at New Haven, and was dominated by the influence of Yale College, within which, especially between 1767 and 1773, was a group of brilliant young men passionately devoted to the Greek and Roman classics, and brought into contact with the spirit of modern letters through their sympathetic study of the later masters of English prose and verse. The foremost man in this group was John Trumbull.

The new literary life of the Middle Colonies had its seat in the neighbourhood of New York and Philadelphia, and was keenly stimulated by the influence of their two colleges, and also by that of the College of New Jersey under the strong man—Witherspoon—who came to its presidency in 1768. The foremost representative of this new literary tendency was Philip Freneau, a true man of genius, the one poet of unquestionable originality granted to America prior to the nineteenth century. Of him and of his brother poet in New England, it is to be said that both began to do their work while still in youth; both seemed to have a vocation for disinterested literature in prose as well as in verse; both were reluctantly driven from that vocation by the intolerable political storm that then burst over the land; both were swept into the Revolutionary movement, and, thenceforward, the chief literary work of both was as political satirists. From about the year 1774, little trace of an Æsthetic purpose in American letters is to be discovered until after the close of the Revolution.

Classification of the Revolutionary Writings.—The characteristic life of the period we now have in view was political, and not political only, but polemic, and fiercely polemic, and at last revolutionary; and its true literary expression is to be recognised in those writings, whether in prose or in verse, which gave utterance to that life. Such writings seem naturally to fall into nine principal classes.

First, may here be named the correspondence of the time; especially, the letters touching on public affairs which passed between persons in different portions of America, and in which men of kindred opinions found one another out, informed one another, stimulated, guided, aided one another, in the common struggle. Indeed, the correspondence of our Revolution, both official and unofficial, constitutes a vast, a fascinating, and a significant branch of its literature. Undoubtedly, the best of all the letter-writers of the time was Franklin; and next to him, perhaps, were John Adams, and Abigail Adams, his wife. Indeed the letters of Mrs. Adams, mostly to her husband, and covering this entire period, are among the most delightful specimens of such work as done by any American. Not far behind these first three letter-writers, if indeed they were behind them, must be mentioned Jefferson and John Dickinson; and, for shrewdness of observation, for humour, for lightness of touch, for the gracious negligÉe of cultivated speech, not far behind any of them was a letter-writer now almost unknown, Richard Peters of Philadelphia. Of course, no one goes to the letters of Washington, in the expectation of finding there sprightliness of thought, flexibility, or ease of movement; yet, in point of diligence and productiveness, he was one of the great letter-writers of that age.

The second form of literature embodying the characteristic life of our Revolutionary era is made up of those writings which were put forth at nearly every critical stage of the long contest, either by the local legislatures, or by the General Congress, or by prominent men in public office, and which may now be described comprehensively as State Papers. It is probable that we have never yet sufficiently considered the extraordinary intellectual merits of this great group of writings, or the prodigious practical service which, by means of those merits, they rendered to the struggling cause of American self-government, particularly in procuring for the insurrectionary colonists, first, the respectful recognition, and then the moral confidence, of the civilised world.

The third class of writings directly expressive of the spirit and life of the Revolution consists of oral addresses, either secular or sacred,—that is, of speeches, formal orations, and political sermons. “In America, as in the Grand Rebellion in England,” said a Loyalist writer—Boucher—of our Revolutionary time, “much execution was done by sermons.” Had it been otherwise, there would now be cause for wonder. Indeed, the preachers were then in full possession of that immense leadership, intellectual and moral, which had belonged to their order, in America ever since its settlement, in England ever since the middle of the sixteenth century; and though this tradition of leadership was beginning to suffer under the rivalry of the printing-press and under the ever-thickening blows of rationalism, yet, when aroused and concentrated upon any object, they still wielded an enormous influence over the opinions and actions of men,—even as to the business of this world. Without the aid “of the black regiment,” as he facetiously called them, James Otis declared his inability to carry his points. Late in the year 1774, the Loyalist, Daniel Leonard, in an essay accounting for the swift and alarming growth of the spirit of resistance and even of revolution in America, gave a prominent place to the part then played in the agitation by “our dissenting ministers.” “What effect must it have had upon the audience,” said he, “to hear the same sentiments and principles, which they had before read in a newspaper, delivered on Sundays from the sacred desk, with a religious awe, and the most solemn appeals to heaven, from lips which they had been taught from their cradles to believe could utter nothing but eternal truths!” The literary history of the pulpit of the American Revolution is virtually a history of the pulpit-champions of that movement; since those preachers who were not its champions could seldom find a printer bold enough to put their sermons to press, or even an opportunity to speak them from the pulpit. Nor was it necessary that ministers should seem to go out of their way in order to discourse upon those bitter secular themes: indeed, they would have been forced to go out of their way in order to avoid doing so. Fast days, thanksgiving days, election days, the anniversaries of battles and of important acts of Congress and of other momentous events in the progress of the struggle, brought such topics to the very doors of their studies, and even laid them upon the open Bibles in their pulpits. Moreover, if any clergyman held back from political preaching, he was not likely to escape some reminder, more or less gentle, as to what was expected of him in such a time of awful stress and peril. “Does Mr. Wibird preach against oppression and the other cardinal vices of the time?” wrote John Adams to his wife, from Philadelphia, shortly after the battle of Bunker Hill. “Tell him, the clergy here of every denomination, not excepting the Episcopalian, thunder and lighten every Sabbath. They pray for Boston and the Massachusetts. They thank God most explicitly and fervently for our remarkable successes. They pray for the American army.”

More than in all other publications, it was in the fourth class of writings, namely, the political essays of the period, that the American people, on both sides of the great controversy, gave utterance to their real thoughts, their real purposes, their fears, their hopes, their hatreds, touching the bitter questions which then divided them. The political essay, whether in the shape of the newspaper article or in that of the pamphlet, gives us the most characteristic type of American literature for that portion of the eighteenth century.

Closely associated with the political essay as the most powerful form of prose in the literature of the American Revolution, should be mentioned the political satire, as being likewise the most powerful form of verse during the same period, and as constituting the fifth class of writings directly expressive of its thought and passion. The best examples of satire to be met with among us before the Revolutionary dispute had reached its culmination may be seen in the earlier and non-political verse of Freneau and John Trumbull. It is true that no great place was given to satire until about the year 1775—that is, until the debate had nearly passed beyond the stage of argument. From that time, however, and until very near the close of the Revolution, this form of literature rivalled, and at times almost set aside, the political essay as an instrument of impassioned political strife. On the Revolutionist side, the chief masters of political satire were Francis Hopkinson, John Trumbull, and Philip Freneau. On the side of the Loyalists, the satirical poet who in art and in power surpassed all his fellows, was Jonathan Odell.

For the sixth class of writings characteristic of the period, we may take the popular lyric poetry of the Revolution,—the numberless verses, commonly quite inelaborate and unadorned, that were written to be sung at the hearth-stone, by the camp-fire, on the march, on the battle-field, in all places of solemn worship.

Our seventh class gathers up the numerous literary memorials of the long struggle as a mere wit-combat, a vast miscellany of humorous productions in verse and prose. The newspapers of the Revolutionary period are strewn with such productions,—satirical poems, long and short, of nearly all degrees of merit and demerit, some of them gross and obscene, some of them simply clownish and stupid, some absolutely brutal in their partisan ferocity, some really clever—terse, polished, and edged with wit.

For the eighth class, partly in prose, chiefly in verse, are brought together the dramatic compositions of the period,—a class not inconsiderable in number, in variety, in vigour, and thoroughly representative both of the humour and of the tragic sentiment of the period. Tentative and crude as are nearly all of these writings, they are not unworthy of some slight attention, in the first place, as giving the genesis of a department of American literature now become considerable; but, chiefly, as reproducing the ideas, the passions, the motives, and the moods of that stormful time in our history, with a frankness, a liveliness, and an unshrinking realism not approached by any other species of Revolutionary literature.

Finally, to the ninth class belong those prose narratives that sprang out of the actual experiences of the Revolution, and that have embodied such experiences in the several forms of personal diaries, military journals, tales of adventure on land or sea, and especially records of suffering in the military prisons. Besides these, there are several elaborate contemporary histories of the Revolution.

Perhaps no aspect of the Revolutionary War has touched more powerfully the imagination and sympathy of the American people, than that relating to the sufferings borne by their own sailors and soldiers who chanced to fall as prisoners into the hands of the enemy; and for many years after the war, the bitterness which it brought into the hearts of men was kept alive and was hardened into a perdurable race-tradition through the tales which were told by the survivors of the British prison-pens and especially of the British prison-ships.

II. THE PRINCIPAL WRITERS

James Otis.—After his graduation at Harvard, at the age of eighteen, James Otis spent a year and a half at home in the study of literature and philosophy; then, devoting himself to the law, he had begun its practice at Plymouth in 1748; after two years of residence there, he had removed to Boston, and in spite of his youth, he had quickly risen to the highest rank in his profession. Throughout his whole career, he held to his early love of the Roman and Greek classics, particularly of Homer; while in English his literary taste was equally robust and wholesome. He was a powerful writer, and he wrote much; but in the structure and form of what he wrote, there are few traces of that enthusiasm for classical literature which we know him to have possessed. Perhaps his nature was too harsh, too passionate and ill-balanced, to yield to the culture even of a literary perfection which he could fully recognise and enjoy in others. He was, above all things, an orator; and his oratory was of the tempestuous kind—bold, vehement, irregular, overpowering.

In July, 1764, he published his gravest and most moderate pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Of all his political writing, this is the most sedate. It has even a tone of solemnity. Indeed, its moderation of tone, at the time, gave considerable offence to some of his own associates. The pamphlet was said to have satisfied nobody. Yet it gave food for thought to everybody; and it is the one work of Otis on which rests his reputation as a serious political thinker. The real object of Otis in this powerful pamphlet was not to bring about a revolution, but to avert one. But its actual effect was to furnish the starting-point for the entire movement of revolutionary reasoning, by which some two millions of people were to justify themselves in the years to come, as they advanced along their rugged and stormy path toward independence. It became for a time one of the legal text-books of the opponents of the ministry; it was a law-arsenal, from which other combatants, on that side, drew some of their best weapons. It expounded, with perfect clearness, even if with some shrinking, the constitutional philosophy of the whole subject; and it gave to the members of a conservative and a law-respecting race a conservative and a lawful pretext for resisting law, and for revolutionising the government.

John Adams.—Among the most striking of the literary responses to the news that, in disregard of all appeals from America, the Stamp Act had become a law, was one by a writer of extraordinary vigour in argument, of extraordinary affluence in invective, who chose to view the whole problem as having logical and historical relations far more extensive than had then been commonly supposed. This writer was John Adams, then but thirty years old, a rising member of the bar of Massachusetts, already known in that neighbourhood for his acuteness, fearlessness, and restless energy as a thinker and for a certain truculent and sarcastic splendour in his style of speech. To the very end of his long life, even his most offhand writings, such as diaries and domestic letters, reveal in him a trait of speculative activity and boldness. With the exception of Jefferson, he is the most readable of the statesmen of the Revolutionary period. A series of four essays by John Adams, which were first published, though without his name and without any descriptive title, in The Boston Gazette, in August, 1765, by their wide range of allusion, their novelty, audacity, eloquence, by the jocular savagery of their sarcasms on things sacred, easily and quickly produced a stir, and won for themselves considerable notoriety. In 1768, they were welded together into a single document, and as such were published in London under the somewhat misleading title of A Dissertation on the Canon and the Federal Law.

Francis Hopkinson.—On September 5, 1774, forty-four respectable gentlemen, representing twelve “colonies and provinces in North America,” made their way into Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia, and there began “to consult upon the present state of the colonies.” Thus came into life the first Continental Congress, and with it the permanent political union of the American people. As they came out from that hall, some of them may have found, on stepping into Mr. John Dunlap’s shop not far away, a lively-looking little book—A Pretty Story—just come from the printer’s hands, in which book, under the veil of playful allegory, they could read in a few minutes a graphic and indeed a quite tremendous history of the very events that had brought them together in that place. Even a glance over this little book will show that here at last was a writer, enlisted in the colonial cause, who was able to defend that cause, and to assail its enemies, with a fine and a very rare weapon—that of humour. The personages included in A Pretty Story are few; its topics are simple and palpable, and even now in but little need of elucidation; the plot and incidents of the fiction travel in the actual footsteps of well-known history; while the aptness, the delicacy, and the humour of the allegory give to the reader the most delightful surprises, and are well sustained to the very end. Indeed, the wit of the author flashes light upon every legal question then at issue; and the stern and even technical debate between the colonies and the motherland is here translated into a piquant and a bewitching novelette. It soon became known that its author was Francis Hopkinson.

By this neat and telling bit of work, Hopkinson took his true place as one of the three leading satirists on the Whig side of the American Revolution,—the other two being John Trumbull and Philip Freneau. In the long and passionate controversy in which these three satirists bore so effective a part, each is distinguishable by his own peculiar note. The political satire of Freneau and of Trumbull is, in general, grim, bitter, vehement, unrelenting. Hopkinson’s satire is as keen as theirs, but its characteristic note is one of playfulness. They stood forth the wrathful critics and assailants of the enemy, confronting him with a hot and an honest hatred, and ready to overwhelm him with an acerbity that was fell and pitiless. Hopkinson, on the other hand, was too gentle, too tender-hearted—his personal tone was too full of amenity—for that sort of warfare. As a satirist, he accomplished his effects without bitterness or violence. No one saw more vividly than he what was weak, or despicable, or cruel, in the position and conduct of the enemy; but in exhibiting it, his method was that of good-humoured ridicule. Never losing his temper, almost never extreme in emotion or in expression, with an urbanity which kept unfailingly upon his side the sympathies of his readers, he knew how to dash and discomfit the foe with a raillery that was all the more effective because it seemed to spring from the very absurdity of the case, and to be, as Ben Jonson required, “without malice or heat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we attempt to estimate the practical effects of John Dickinson’s work as a political writer during the American Revolution, we shall find it not easy to disentangle and to separate them from the practical effects of his work as a politician. The two lines of power were closely interwoven; each, in the main, helped the other, as each was liable, in its turn, to be hindered by the other. At any rate, just as the politico-literary influence of James Otis was, upon the whole, predominant in America from 1764 until 1767, so, from the latter date until some months after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, was the politico-literary influence of John Dickinson predominant here. Moreover, as he succeeded to James Otis in the development of Revolutionary thought, so was he, at last, succeeded by Thomas Paine, who held sway among us, as the chief writer of political essays, from the early part of 1776 until the close of the Revolution itself. The prodigious decline in the influence of John Dickinson, at the approach of the issue of independence, is a thing not hard to explain; it was due in part to his personal characteristics, in part to the nature of his opinions. From the beginning of the troubles until some months after the first shedding of blood, in 1775, public opinion in America had set strongly in favour of making demand—even armed demand—for our political rights, but without any rupture of the colonial tie. It was, therefore, a period calling for clear and resolute statements of our claims, but with loyalty, urbanity, and tact. To be the chief literary exponent of such a period, John Dickinson was in every way fitted by talent, by temperament, by training. A man of wealth, cultivation, and elegant surroundings, practically versed in the law and in politics, considerate, cautious, disinclined to violent measures and to stormy scenes, actuated by a passion for the unity and the greatness of the English race and for peace among all men, it was his sincere desire that the dispute with the mother country should be so conducted as to end, at last, in the perfect establishment of American constitutional rights within the empire, but without any hurt or dishonour to England, and without any permanent failure in respect and kindness between her and ourselves. Nevertheless, in 1775, events occurred which gave a different aspect to the whole dispute, and swept an apparent majority of the American people quite beyond the sphere of such ideas and methods. John Dickinson’s concession to Parliament of a legislative authority over us, even to a limited extent, was roughly discarded; instead of which was enthroned among us the unhistoric and makeshift doctrine that American allegiance was due not at all to Parliament, but to the Crown only. Moreover, the moderation of tone, the urbane speech, the civility in conduct, exemplified by Dickinson in all this dispute with England, then became an anachronism and an offence. We were plunged at last into civil war—we had actually reached the stage of revolution; and the robust men who then ruled the scene were disposed, with no little contempt, to brush aside the moderate, conservative, and courteous Dickinson, who, either for advice or for conduct, seemed to them to have no further function to perform in the American world. His Farmer’s Letters were declared by Jefferson to have been “really an ‘ignis fatuus,’ misleading us from true principles.” Even Edward Rutledge, who, in June, 1776, agreed with Dickinson in his opposition to the plan for independence, nevertheless expressed some impatience with his intellectual fastidiousness and nicety,—declaring that the “vice of all his productions, to a considerable degree,” was “the vice of refining too much.”

Alexander Hamilton.—Within two or three weeks from the day on which the Congress announced its grand scheme for an agreement among the American colonists not to import or to consume the chief materials of the English carrying-trade, nor to export the chief products of their own farms, there came from the press of New York a pamphlet—Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress—ostensibly written by a farmer, and addressed to farmers, and from the level of their particular interests subjecting the proposal of Congress to a sort of criticism that was well fitted to arouse against it the bitterest and most unrelenting opposition of the great agricultural class. The writer of this pamphlet—Samuel Seabury, a Loyalist clergyman—professed to be a “Westchester Farmer,”—a signature which at once became the target for vast applause and for vast execration. The first pamphlet was dated November 16, 1774. Twelve days from that date came his second one—as keen, as fiery, as powerful as the first. In less than four weeks from the day of his second pamphlet, the undaunted farmer was ready with a third one. No sooner was this pamphlet off his hands, than the “Westchester Farmer” seems to have set to work upon his fourth pamphlet.

Among the throng of replies which burst forth from the press in opposition to the tremendous pamphlets of the “Westchester Farmer,” were two which immediately towered into chief prominence: A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, and The Farmer Refuted. The extraordinary ability of these two pamphlets—their fulness in constitutional learning, their acumen, their affluence in statement, their cleverness in controversial repartee, their apparent wealth in the fruits of an actual acquaintance with public business—led both the “Westchester Farmer” and the public in general to attribute them to some American writer of mature years and of ripe experience—to some member of the late Congress, for example—particularly to John Jay or to William Livingston. It is not easy to overstate the astonishment and the incredulity with which the public soon heard the rumour that these elaborate and shattering literary assaults on the argumentative position of the Loyalists were, in reality, the work of a writer who was then both a stripling in years and a stranger in the country—one Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian by birth, a Franco-Scotsman by parentage, an undergraduate of King’s College by occupation, a resident within the Thirteen Colonies but little more than two years, and at the time of the publication of his first pamphlet only seventeen years of age. In the exposition of his views touching the several vast fields of thought here brought under consideration,—constitutional law, municipal law, the long line of colonial charters, colonial laws and precedents, international polity as affecting the chief nations of Christendom, justice in the abstract and justice in the concrete, human rights both natural and conventional, the physical and metaphysical conditions underlying the great conflict then impending,—it must be confessed that this beardless philosopher, this statesman not yet out of school, this military strategist scarcely rid of his roundabout, exhibits a range and precision of knowledge, a ripeness of judgment, a serenity, a justice, a massiveness both of thought and of style, which would perhaps make incredible the theory of his authorship of these pamphlets, were not this theory confirmed by his undoubted exhibition in other ways, at about the same period of his life, of the same astonishing qualities.

Thomas Paine.—As the bitter events of 1775 rapidly unfolded themselves, not a few Americans became convinced that there was no true solution of the trouble except in that very independence which they had but a short time before dreaded and denounced. Of such Americans, Thomas Paine was one; and towards the end of the year, through incessant communication with the foremost minds in America, he had filled his own mind with the great decisive elements of the case, and was prepared to utter his thought thereon. Early in January, 1776, he did utter it, in the form of a pamphlet, published at Philadelphia, and entitled Common Sense,—the first open and unqualified argument in championship of the doctrine of American independence. During the first ten or twelve years of the Revolution, in just one sentiment all persons, Tories and Whigs, seemed perfectly to agree; namely, in abhorrence of the project of separation from the empire. Suddenly, however, and within a period of less than six months, the majority of the Whigs turned completely around, and openly declared for independence, which, before that time, they had so vehemently repudiated. Among the facts necessary to enable us to account for this almost unrivalled political somersault, is that of the appearance of Common Sense. This pamphlet was happily named: it undertook to apply common sense to a technical, complex, but most urgent and feverish, problem of constitutional law. In fact, on any other ground than that of common sense, the author of that pamphlet was incompetent to deal with the problem at all; since of law, of political science, and even of English and American history, he was ludicrously ignorant. But for the effective treatment of any question whatsoever that was capable of being dealt with under the light of the broad and rugged intellectual instincts of mankind,—man’s natural sense of truth, of congruity, of fair-play,—perhaps no other man in America, excepting Franklin, was a match for this ill-taught, heady, and slashing English stranger. From the tribunal of technical law, therefore, he carried the case to the tribunal of common sense; and in his plea before that tribunal, he never for a moment missed his point, or forgot his method. The one thing just then to be done was to convince the average American colonist of the period that it would be ridiculous for him any longer to remain an American colonist; that the time had come for him to be an American citizen; that nothing stood in the way of his being so, but the trash of a few pedants respecting the authority of certain bedizened animals called kings; and that, whether he would or no, the alternative was at last thrust into his face upon the point of a bayonet,—either to declare for national independence, and a wide-spaced and resplendent national destiny, or to accept, along with subserviency to England, the bitterness and the infamy of national annihilation. With all its crudities of thought, its superficiality, and its rashness of assertion, Common Sense is a masterly pamphlet; for in the elements of its strength it was precisely fitted to the hour, to the spot, and to the passions of men. Even its smattering of historical lore, and its cheap display of statistics, and its clumsy attempts at some sort of political philosophy, did not diminish the homage with which it was read by the mass of the community, who were even less learned and less philosophical than Paine, and who, at any rate, cared much more just then for their imperilled rights, than they did either for philosophy or for learning. The immediate practical effects of this pamphlet in America, and the celebrity which it soon acquired in Europe as well as in America, are a significant part of its history as a potential literary document of the period. In every impassioned popular discussion there is likely to spring up a leader, who with pen or voice strikes in, at just the right moment, with just the right word, so skilfully, so powerfully, that thenceforward the intellectual battle seems to be raging and surging around him and around the fiery word which he has sent shrilling through the air. So far as the popular discussion of American independence is concerned, precisely this was the case, between January and July, 1776, with Thomas Paine and his pamphlet Common Sense. Within three months from the date of its first issue, at least 120,000 copies of it were sold in America alone. By that time, the pamphlet seemed to be in every one’s hand and the theme of every one’s talk.

Noble-minded and important as were the various services rendered by Paine to the American cause, on sea and land, in office and field, they could in no way be compared, as contributions to the success of the Revolution, with the work which he did during those same imperilled years merely as a writer, and especially as the writer of The Crisis. Between December, 1776, when the first pamphlet of that series was published, down to December, 1783, when the last one left the printer’s hands, this indomitable man produced no less than sixteen pamphlets under the same general title, adapting his message in each case to the supreme need of the hour, and accomplishing all this literary labour in a condition of actual poverty.

Thomas Jefferson.—On June 21, 1775, Thomas Jefferson took his seat for the first time as a member of the Continental Congress. He had then but recently passed his thirty-second birthday, and was known to be the author of two or three public papers of considerable note. Early in June, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, receiving the largest number of votes, was placed at the head of the committee of illustrious men to whom was assigned the task of preparing a suitable Declaration of Independence, and thereby he became the draftsman of the one American state paper that has reached to supreme distinction in the world, and that seems likely to last as long as American civilisation lasts. Whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the world has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its first appearance or since then,—a fact which seems to tell in favour of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again and again, either in anger or in contempt, by friends as well as by enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, it has been censured for its form; for its misstatements of fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally, for its grandiose and vapouring style. Yet, probably no public paper ever more perfectly satisfied the immediate purposes for which it was sent forth. From one end of the country to the other, and as far as it could be spread among the people, it was greeted in public and in private with every demonstration of approval and delight. To a marvellous degree, it quickened the friends of the Revolution for their great task. Moreover, during the century and more since the close of the Revolution, the influence of this state paper on the political character and the political conduct of the American people has been great beyond all calculation.

No man can adequately explain the persistent fascination which it has had, and which it still has, for the American people, or for its undiminished power over them, without taking into account its extraordinary literary merits—its possession of the witchery of true substance wedded to perfect form:—its massiveness and incisiveness of thought, its art in the marshalling of the topics with which it deals, its symmetry, its energy, the definiteness and limpidity of its statements, its exquisite diction, at once terse, musical, and electric; and, as an essential part of this literary outfit, many of those spiritual notes which can attract and enthrall our hearts,—veneration for God, veneration for man, veneration for principle, respect for public opinion, moral earnestness, moral courage, optimism, a stately and noble pathos, finally, self-sacrificing devotion to a cause so great as to be herein identified with the happiness, not of one people only, or of one race only, but of human nature itself. We may be altogether sure that no genuine development of literary taste among the American people in any period of our future history can result in serious misfortune to this particular specimen of American literature.

Samuel Adams.—Samuel Adams was a man of letters, but he was so only because he was above all things a man of affairs. Of literary art, in certain forms, he was no mean master; of literary art for art’s sake, he was entirely regardless. He was perhaps the most voluminous political writer of his time in America, and the most influential political writer of his time in New England; but everything that he wrote was meant for a definite practical purpose, and nothing that he wrote seemed to have had any interest for him aside from that purpose. Deep as is the obscurity which has fallen upon his literary services in the cause of the Revolution, the fame of those services was, at the time of them, almost unrivalled by that of any other writer, at least in the colonies east of the Hudson River. Born in Boston in 1722, graduated at Harvard in 1740, he early showed an invincible passion and aptitude for politics. One principal instrument by means of which Samuel Adams so greatly moulded public opinion, and shaped political and even military procedure, was the pen. Of modern politicians, he was among the first to recognise the power of public opinion in directing public events, and likewise the power of the newspaper in directing public opinion. It was, therefore, an essential part of his method as a politician to acquire and to exercise the art of literary statement in a form suited to that particular end. He had the instinct of a great journalist, and of a great journalist willing to screen his individuality behind his journal. In this service, it was not Samuel Adams that Samuel Adams cared to put and to keep before the public,—it was the ideas of Samuel Adams. Accordingly, of all American writers for the newspapers between the years 1754 and 1776, he was perhaps the most vigilant, the most industrious, the most effective, and also the least identified. Ever ready to efface himself in what he did, he realised that the innumerable productions of his pen would make their way to a far wider range of readers, and would be all the more influential, if they seemed to be the work, not of one writer, but of many. Therefore, he almost never published anything under his own name; but, under a multitude of titular disguises which no man has yet been able to number, this sleepless, crafty, protean politician, for nearly a third of a century, kept flooding the community with his ideas, chiefly in the form of essays in the newspapers,—thereby constantly baffling the enemies of the Revolutionary movement, and conducting his followers victoriously through those battles of argument which preceded and then for a time accompanied the battles of arms. In the long line of his state papers—the official utterances of the several public bodies with which he was connected and which so long trusted him as their most deft and unerring penman—one may now trace, almost without a break, the development of the ideas and the measures which formed the Revolution. If we take into account the strain of thought and of emotional energy involved in all these years of fierce political controversy and of most perilous political leadership, we shall hardly fear to overestimate the resources of Samuel Adams in his true career of agitator and iconoclast;—especially the elasticity, the toughness, the persistence of a nature which could, in addition to all this, undertake and carry through, during the same long period, all the work he did in literary polemics,—work which alone might seem enough to employ and tire the strength even of a strong man who had nothing else to do. The traits of Samuel Adams the writer are easily defined—for they are likewise the traits of Samuel Adams the politician, and of Samuel Adams the man. His fundamental rule for literary warfare was this—“Keep your enemy in the wrong.” His style, then, was the expression of his intellectual wariness,—a wariness like that of the scout or the bushwhacker, who knows that behind any tree may lurk his deadly foe, that a false step may be his ruin, that a badly-aimed shot may make it impossible for him ever to shoot again. Whether in oral or in written speech his characteristics were the same,—simplicity, acuteness, logical power, and strict adaptation of means to the practical end in view. Nothing was for effect—everything was for effectiveness. He wrote pure English, and in a style severe, felicitous, pointed, epigrammatic. Careful as to facts, disdainful of rhetorical excesses, especially conscious of the strategic folly involved in mere overstatement, an adept at implication and at the insinuating light stroke, he had never anything to take back or to apologise for. In the wearisome fondness of his country for Greek and Roman analogies, he shared to the full; and, in a less degree, in its passion for the tags and gewgaws of classical quotation. Of course, his style bears the noble impress of his ceaseless and reverent reading of the English Bible. To a mere poet, he seldom alludes. Among secular writers of modern times, his days and nights were given, as occasion served, to Hooker, Coke, Grotius, Locke, Sidney, Vattel, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Hume.

John Witherspoon.—Although John Witherspoon did not come to America until the year 1768,—after he had himself passed the middle line of human life,—yet so quickly did he then enter into the spirit of American society, so perfectly did he identify himself with its nobler moods of discontent and aspiration, so powerfully did he contribute by speech and act to the right development of this new nation out of the old cluster of dispersed and dependent communities, that it would be altogether futile to attempt to frame a just account of the great intellectual movements of our Revolution without some note of the part played in it by this eloquent, wise, and efficient Scotsman—at once teacher, preacher, politician, law-maker, and philosopher, upon the whole not undeserving of the praise which has been bestowed upon him as “one of the great men of the age and of the world.” Born in 1722, at the age of forty-six he accepted an invitation to the presidency of the College of New Jersey. At the time of his removal to America, he had achieved distinction as a preacher and an ecclesiastical leader. Even as an author, also, he had become well known. His advent to the college over which he was to preside was like that of a prince coming to his throne. The powerful influence which, through his published writings, Witherspoon exerted upon the course of Revolutionary thought, may be traced in the very few sermons of his which touch upon the political problems of that time, in various Congressional papers, and especially in the numerous essays, long or short, serious or mirthful, which he gave to the press between the years 1775 and 1783, and commonly without his name. As a writer of political and miscellaneous essays, it is probable that Witherspoon’s activity was far greater than can now be ascertained; but his hand can be traced with certainty in a large group of keen and sprightly productions of that sort. Of all these writings, the chief note is that of a virile mind, well-balanced, well-trained, and holding itself steadily to its own independent conclusions,—in short, of enlightened and imperturbable common sense, speaking out in a form always temperate and lucid, often terse and epigrammatic.

John Woolman.—It is no slight distinction attaching to American literature for the period of the Revolution, that in a time so often characterised as barren of important literary achievement, were produced two of the most perfect examples of autobiography to be met with in any literature. One of these, of course, is Franklin’s Autobiography, the first, the largest, and the best part of which was written in 1771,—a work that has long since taken its place among the most celebrated and most widely read of modern books. Almost at the very time at which that fascinating story was begun, the other great example of autobiography in our Revolutionary literature was finished—The Journal of John Woolman, a book which William Ellery Channing long afterward described as “beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography in the language.” It is a notable fact, however, that while these two masterpieces in the same form of literature are products of the same period, they are, in respect of personal quality, very nearly antipodal to each other; for, as Franklin’s account of himself delineates a career of shrewd and somewhat selfish geniality, of unperturbed carnal content, of kindly systematic and most successful worldliness, so the autobiography of Woolman sets forth a career which turns out to be one of utter unworldliness, of entire self-effacement, all in obedience to an Unseen Leadership, and in meek and most tender devotion to the happiness of others—especially slaves, poor toiling white people, and speechless creatures unable to defend themselves against the inhumanity of man.

John Woolman, who was of a spirit so unpresuming that he would have wondered and have been troubled to be told that any writing of his was ever to be dealt with as literature, was born in 1720 in Northampton, New Jersey, his father being a farmer, and of the Society of Friends. Until his twenty-first year, he lived at home with his parents, and, as he expressed it, “wrought on the plantation.” Having reached his majority, he took employment in the neighbouring village of Mount Holly, in a shop for general merchandise. In this occupation he passed several years; after which he began to give himself almost wholly to the true work of his life—that of an apostle, with a need to go from land to land in fulfilment of his apostleship, and able, like one of the greatest of all apostles, to minister to his own necessities by the labours of a lowly trade. For, long before he set out upon these travels, even from his early childhood, he had entered, as he thought, into the possession of certain treasures of the spirit which he could not hoard up for himself alone,—which, if he could but share them with others, would make others rich and happy beyond desire or even imagination.

The autobiography of John Woolman was the gradual and secret growth of many years, beginning when he was of the age of thirty-six, and added to from time to time until, at the age of fifty-two, being in the city of York, in England, about the business of his Master, he was stricken down of the smallpox, whereof he died. Besides this story of his life, he left several ethical and religious essays. All these writings are, as Whittier has said, in the style “of a man unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language.” “The secret of Woolman’s purity of style,” said Channing, “is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated the words.” There is about John Woolman’s writings that unconventionality of thought, that charity without pretence, that saintliness without sanctimony or sourness, that delicacy, that untaught beauty of phrase, by which we are helped to understand the ardour of Charles Lamb’s love for him, as uttered in his impulsive exhortation to the readers of the Essays of Elia: “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart.” “A perfect gem!” wrote Henry Crabb Robinson, in 1824, of Woolman’s Journal, which Lamb had shortly before made known to him. “His is a ‘schÖne Seele.’ An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisite purity and grace. His moral qualities are transferred to his writings.” Perhaps, after all, the aroma that lingers about Woolman’s words is best described by Woolman’s true spiritual successor in American literature—Whittier—in the saying, that he who reads these writings becomes sensible “of a sweetness as of violets.”

Benjamin Franklin.—For the period of the Revolution the writings of Franklin fall naturally into two principal divisions—first, those connected with the Revolutionary controversy, and, secondly, those almost entirely apart from it. Among the latter, of course, are to be reckoned his numerous papers on scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions; a considerable number of his personal letters—these being, perhaps, the wisest and wittiest of all his writings; many short sketches, usually playful in tone, often in the form of apologues or parables; finally, the first, and the best, part of his Autobiography, which, during the hundred years succeeding its first publication in 1791, has probably been the most widely read book of its class in any language. Here, then, as a product of Franklin’s general literary activity during the Revolutionary period, is a considerable body of literature not concerned in the strifes of that bitter time, almost faultless in form, and so pervaded by sense, gaiety, and kindness, as to be among the most precious and most delightful of the intellectual treasures of mankind.

In Franklin’s literary contributions to the Revolutionary controversy between 1763 and 1783, we find that his relation to that controversy had two strongly contrasted phases: first, his sincere and most strenuous desire that the dispute should not pass from the stage of words to that of blows, and thence to a struggle for American secession from the empire; and, secondly, after the stage of blows had been reached, his championship of American secession through war as the only safe or honourable course then left to his countrymen. The line of division between these two phases of opinion and action falls across the spring and early summer of 1775. Prior to that time, all his writings, serious or jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose of convincing the English people that the American policy of their government was an injustice and a blunder, and of convincing the American people that their demand for political rights would certainly be satisfied, if persisted in steadily and without fear, but also without disloyalty and without unseemly violence. Subsequent to that time, having accepted with real sorrow the alternative of war and of war for American secession, all his writings, serious and jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose of making that war a successful one,—a result to which, as a writer, he could best contribute by such appeals to public opinion in America as should nourish and quicken American confidence in their own cause, and by such appeals to public opinion in Europe as should win for that cause its moral and even its physical support. For reasons that must be obvious, his general literary activity was far greater during the first phase of this controversy than during the second.

Probably no writer ever understood better than he how to make dull subjects lively, and how, by consequence, to attract readers to the consideration of matters in themselves unattractive. As he well knew, the European public, whether upon the Continent or in Great Britain, were not likely to give their days and nights to the perusal of long and solemn dissertations on the rights and wrongs of his countrymen in the other hemisphere. Accordingly, such dissertations he never gave them, but, upon occasion, brief and pithy and apparently casual statements of the American case; exposing, also, the weak points of the case against his own, by means of anecdotes, epigrams, jeux-d’esprit; especially contriving to throw the whole argument into some sort of dramatic form.

Franklin’s favourite weapon in political controversy—a weapon which, perhaps, no other writer in English since Dean Swift has handled with so much cleverness and effect—was that of satire in the form of ludicrous analogue, thereby burlesquing the acts and pretensions of his adversary, and simply overwhelming him with ridicule. Moreover, with Franklin, as had been the case with Dean Swift before him, this species of satire took a form at once so realistic and so comically apt, as to result in several examples of brilliant literary hoaxing—a result which, in the controversy then going on, was likely to be beneficial to the solemn and self-satisfied British Philistine of the period, since it compelled him for once to do a little thinking, and also to stand off and view his own portrait as it then appeared to other people, and even in spite of himself to laugh at his own portentous and costly stupidity in the management of an empire that seemed already grown too big for him to take proper care of. As Franklin was by far the greatest man of letters on the American side of the Revolutionary controversy, so a most luminous and delightful history of the development of thought and emotion during the Revolution might be composed, by merely bringing together detached sayings of Franklin, humorous and serious, just as these fell from his tongue or pen in the successive stages of that long conflict: it would be a trail of light across a sea of storm and gloom. Nevertheless, not by illustrative fragments of what he wrote or said, any more than by modern descriptions, however vivid, can an adequate idea be conveyed of the mass, the force, the variety, the ease, the charm, of his total work as a writer during those twenty tremendous years. Undoubtedly, his vast experience in affairs and the sobriety produced by mere official responsibility had the effect of clarifying and solidifying his thought, and of giving to the lightest products of his genius a sanity and a sureness of movement which, had he been a man of letters only, they could hardly have had in so high a degree. It is only by a continuous reading of the entire body of Franklin’s Revolutionary writings, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, that any one can know how brilliant was his wisdom, or how wise was his brilliancy, or how humane and gentle and helpful were both. No one who, by such a reading, procures for himself such a pleasure and such a benefit, will be likely to miss the point of Sydney Smith’s playful menace to his daughter,—“I will disinherit you, if you do not admire everything written by Franklin.”

Thomas Hutchinson.—Within the two decades of the American Revolution are to be found two distinct expressions of the historic spirit among this people. In the first place, from a consciousness of the meaning and worth of the unique social experiments then already made by each of the thirteen little republics, came the impulse which led to the writing of their local history. Afterward, from a similar consciousness of the meaning and worth of the immense events which began to unfold themselves in the collective political and military experience of these thirteen little republics, then rapidly melting together into a larger national life under the fires of a common danger, came the impulse which led to the writing of their general history.

Reaching the line which divides colonial themes from those of the Revolution, we confront a writer who, in his capacity as historian, not only towers above all his contemporaries, but deals with themes which are both colonial and Revolutionary. This writer is the man so famous and so hated in his day as a Loyalist statesman and magistrate, Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian who served as governor of Massachusetts under appointment by the king. That he deserves to be ranked as, upon the whole, the ablest historical writer produced in America prior to the nineteenth century, there is now substantial agreement among scholars. In writing the early history of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson was in effect writing the history of his own ancestors, some of whom had been eminent, some of whom had been notorious, in the colony almost from the year of its foundation. He was born in Boston in 1711. From the age of twenty-six when he was elected to his first office, until the age of sixty-three when he resigned his last one, he was kept constantly and conspicuously in the public service. Before the outbreak of the great controversy between the colonies and the British government, no other man in America had, to so high a degree as Hutchinson, the confidence both of the British government on the one hand, and of his own countrymen on the other. Had his advice been taken in that controversy by either of the two parties who had so greatly confided in him, the war of the Revolution would have been averted. While the writing of history was for Hutchinson but the recreation and by-play of a life immersed in outward business, the study of history seems to have been a passion with him almost from his childhood. It should be added that Hutchinson had the scientific idea of the importance of primary documents. Through his great eminence in the community, and through his ceaseless zeal in the collection of such documents, he was enabled in the course of many years to bring together a multitude of manuscript materials of priceless value touching the history of New England. With such materials at his command, and using with diligence those fragments of time which his unflagging energy enabled him to pluck from business and from sleep, he was ready, in July, 1764, amid the first mutterings of that political storm which was to play havoc with these peaceful studies and to shatter the hopes of his lifetime, to send to the printer, in Boston, the first volume of The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. He published his second volume in the early summer of the year 1767,—not far from the very day on which Parliament, by the passage of the Townshend Act, perpetrated the ineffable folly of plunging the empire into such tumults as led to its disruption. Notwithstanding the lurid and bitter incidents amid which it was written, the second volume of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts, like the first one, has the tone of moderation and of equanimity suggestive of a philosopher abstracted from outward cares, and devoted to the disinterested discovery and exposition of the truth.

From the time of the publication of the second instalment of his work, sixty-one years were to elapse before the public should receive ocular evidence that the author had had the fortitude, amid the calamities which overwhelmed his later years, to go on with his historical labours, and to complete a third and final volume, telling the story of Massachusetts from the year 1750 until the year 1774—the year in which he laid down his office as governor and departed for England. Borne down with sorrow, amazed and horror-stricken at the fury of the storm that was overturning his most prudent calculations, and was sweeping him and his party from all their moorings out into an unknown sea, he found some solace in resuming in England the historical task which he had left unfinished. In his diary for October 22, 1778, its completion is recorded in this modest note: “I finished the revisal of my History, to the end of my Administration, and laid it by.” Laid by certainly it was, and not until the year 1828 was it permitted to come forth to the light of day, and then, largely, through the magnanimous intervention of a group of noble-minded American scholars in the very city which, in his later lifetime, would not have permitted his return to it.

A great historian Hutchinson certainly was not, and, under the most favourable outward conditions, could not have been. He had the fundamental virtues of a great historian—love of truth, love of justice, diligence, the ability to master details and to narrate them with accuracy. Even in the exercise of these fundamental virtues, however, no historian in Hutchinson’s circumstances could fail to be hampered by the enormous preoccupation of official business, or to have his judgment warped and coloured by the prepossessions of his own political career. While Hutchinson was, indeed, a miracle of industry, it was only a small part of his industry that he was free to devote to historical research. However sincere may have been his purpose to tell the truth and to be fair to all, the literary product of such research was inevitably weakened, as can now be abundantly shown, by many serious oversights and by many glaring misrepresentations, apparently through his failure to make a thorough use of important sources of information then accessible to him, such as colonial pamphlets, colonial newspapers, the manuscripts of his own ancestors and of the Mathers, and especially the General Court records of the province in which he played so great a part. As to the rarer intellectual and spiritual endowments of a great historian,—breadth of vision, breadth of sympathy, the historic imagination, and the power of style,—these Hutchinson almost entirely lacked. That he had not the gift of historical divination, the vision and the faculty divine to see the inward meaning of men and events, and to express that meaning in gracious, noble, and fascinating speech—Hutchinson was himself partly conscious.

His first volume seems to have been written under a consciousness that his subject was provincial, and even of a local interest altogether circumscribed. In the second volume, one perceives a more cheery and confident tone, due, probably, to the prompt recognition which his labours had then received not only in Massachusetts but in England. In the third volume are to be observed signs of increasing ease in composition, a more flowing and copious style, not a few felicities of expression. That, in all these volumes, he intended to tell the truth, and to practise fairness, is also plain; to say that he did not entirely succeed, is to say that he was human. Of course, the supreme test of historical fairness was reached when he came to the writing of his third volume,—which was, in fact, the history not only of his contemporaries but of himself, and of himself in deep and angry disagreement with many of them. It is much to his praise to say that, throughout this third volume, the prevailing tone is calm, moderate, just, with only occasional efforts at pleading his own cause, with only occasional flickers of personal or political enmity. But no one should approach the reading of Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay with the expectation of finding in it either brilliant writing or an entertaining story. From beginning to end, there are few passages that can be called even salient—but almost everywhere an even flow of statesmanlike narrative; severe in form; rather dull, probably, to all who have not the preparation of a previous interest in the matters discussed; but always pertinent, vigorous, and full of pith. Notwithstanding Hutchinson’s modest opinion of his own ability in the drawing of historical portraits, it is probable that in such portraits of distinguished characters, both among his contemporaries and among his predecessors, the general reader will be likely to find himself the most interested.

Samuel Peters.—Somewhere in the debatable land between history, fiction, and burlesque, there wanders a notorious book, first published anonymously in London in 1781, and entitled A General History of Connecticut. Though the authorship of this book was never acknowledged by the man who wrote it, there is no doubt that it was the work of Samuel Peters, an Anglican clergyman and a Loyalist, a man of commanding personal presence, uncommon intellectual resources, powerful will, and ill-balanced character. He opposed with frank and bitter aggressiveness the Revolutionary politics then rampant. He sailed for England in October, 1774. There he abode until his return to America in 1805. During the five or six years immediately following his arrival in England, he seems to have had congenial employment in composing his General History of Connecticut, as a means apparently of wreaking an undying vengeance upon the sober little commonwealth in which he was born and from which he had been ignominiously cast out. The result of this long labour of hate was a production, calling itself historical, which was characterised by a contemporary English journal—The Monthly Review—as having “so many marks of party spleen and idle credulity” as to be “altogether unworthy of the public attention.” In spite, however, of such censure both then and since then, this alleged History has had, now for more than a hundred years, not only a vast amount of public attention, but very considerable success in a form that seems to have been dear to its author’s heart—that of spreading through the English-speaking world a multitude of ludicrous impressions to the dishonour of the people of whom it treats. It cannot be denied that for such a service it was most admirably framed; since its grotesque fabrications in disparagement of a community of Puritan dissenters seem to have proved a convenient quarry for ready-made calumnies upon that sort of people there and elsewhere.

Jonathan Carver.—In the year 1763, at the close of that famous war which resulted in the acquisition of Canada by the English, there was in New England an enterprising young American soldier, named Jonathan Carver, stranded as it were amid the threatened inanities of peace and civilisation, and confronting a prospect that was for him altogether insipid through its lack of adventure, and especially of barbaric restlessness and discomfort. “I began to consider,” so he wrote a few years afterward, “having rendered my country some services during the war, how I might continue still serviceable, and contribute, as much as lay in my power, to make that vast acquisition of territory gained by Great Britain in North America, advantageous to it. To this purpose, I determined to explore the most unknown parts of them.” The project thus clearly wrought out in 1763 by this obscure provincial captain in New England anticipated by forty years the American statesmanship which, under President Jefferson, sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to penetrate the passes of the Rocky Mountains and to pitch their tents by the mouth of the Columbia River; even as it anticipated by a hundred years the Canadian statesmanship which, under Sir John Macdonald, has in our time beaten out an iron way across the continent at its greatest breadth.

It seems to have taken Carver about three years to complete his preparations for the tremendous enterprise which then inspired him. Not until June, 1766,—in the political lull occasioned by the repeal of the Stamp Act—was he able to start. After passing Albany, he plunged at once into the wilderness which then stretched its rough dominion over the uncomputed spaces to the western sea. In June, 1768, he began his journey homeward. In the October following, he reached Boston, “having,” as he says, “been absent from it on this expedition two years and five months, and during that time travelled near seven thousand miles. From thence, as soon as I had properly digested my journal and charts, I set out for England, to communicate the discoveries I had made, and to render them beneficial to the kingdom.” In 1778, nine years after his arrival there, he succeeded in bringing out his noble and fascinating book of Travels through the Interior Parts of North America. It was in consequence of the publication, soon after his death, in the year 1780, of the tale of Carver’s career as an explorer in America, and especially of the struggles and the miseries he encountered as an American man of letters in London, that, for the relief in future of deserving men of letters there, the foundation was laid for that munificent endowment, now so celebrated under the name of “The Royal Literary Fund.” His best monument is his book. As a contribution to the history of inland discovery upon this continent, and especially to our materials for true and precise information concerning the “manners, customs, religion, and language of the Indians,” Carver’s book of Travels is of unsurpassed value. Besides its worth for instruction, is its worth for delight; we have no other “Indian book” more captivating than this. Here is the charm of a sincere, powerful, and gentle personality—the charm of novel and significant facts, of noble ideas, of humane sentiments, all uttered in English well-ordered and pure. In evidence, also, of the European celebrity acquired by his book, may be cited the fact that it seems to have had a strong fascination for Schiller, as, indeed, might have been expected; and Carver’s report of a harangue by a Nadowessian chief over the dead body of one of their great warriors—being itself a piece of true poetry in prose—was turned into verse by the German poet, and became famous as his Nadowessiers Totenlied,—a dirge which pleased Goethe so much that he declared it to be among the best of Schiller’s poems in that vein, and wished that his friend had written a dozen such.2

St. John CrÈvecoeur.—In 1782, there was published in London an American book written with a sweetness of tone and, likewise, with a literary grace and a power of fascination then quite unexpected from the western side of the Atlantic. It presented itself to the public behind this ample title-page:—“Letters from an American Farmer, describing certain provincial situations, manners, and customs, not generally known, and conveying some idea of the late and present interior circumstances of the British Colonies in North America: written for the information of a friend in England, by J. Hector St. John, a farmer in Pennsylvania.” The name of the author as thus given upon his title-page, was not his name in full, but only the baptismal portion of it. By omitting from the book his surname, which was CrÈvecoeur, he had chosen to disguise to the English public the fact—which could hardly have added to his welcome among them—that though he was an American, he was not an English American, but a French one,—having been born in Normandy, and of a noble family there, in 1731. While really an American farmer, CrÈvecoeur was a man of education, of refinement, of varied experience in the world. When but a lad of sixteen, he had removed from France to England; when but twenty-three, he had emigrated to America.

As an account of the American colonies, this book makes no pretension either to system or to completeness; and yet it does attain to a sort of breadth of treatment by seizing upon certain representative traits of the three great groups of colonies,—the northern, the middle, and the southern. There are in this book two distinct notes—one of great peace, another of great pain. The earlier and larger portion of the book gives forth this note of peace: it is a prose pastoral of life in the New World, as that life must have revealed itself to a well-appointed American farmer of poetic and optimistic temper, in the final stage of our colonial era, and just before the influx of the riot and bitterness of the great disruption. This note of peace holds undisturbed through the first half of the book, and more. Not until, in the latter half of it, the author comes to describe slavery in the Far South, likewise the harsh relations between the colonists and the Indians, finally the outbreak of the tempest of civil war, does his book give out its second note—the note of pain. By its inclusion of these sombre and agonising aspects of life in America, the book gains, as is most obvious, both in authenticity and literary strength. It is not hard to understand why, at such a time, a book like this should soon have made its way into the languages of Europe, particularly those of France, Germany, and Holland; nor why it should have fascinated multitudes of readers in all parts of the Continent, even beguiling many of them—too many of them, perhaps—to try their fortunes in that blithe and hospitable portion of the planet where the struggle for existence seemed almost a thing unknown. In England, likewise, the book won for itself, as was natural, a wide and a gracious consideration; its praises lasted among English men of letters as long, at least, as until the time of Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; while its idealised treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects upon the imagination of Campbell, Byron, Southey, and Coleridge, and furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes of literary colonisation in America as that of “Pantisocracy.”