Literature I: Literary Form and Politics

Sources

Political Debate. Revolutionary era literature was written in the context of political conflict. In thousands of columns of colonial newspapers, hundreds of published pamphlets, and countless topical poems this polemical writing addressed particular issues and events that led to war with the mother country. While this literature typically concerned itself with the details of imperial policy—virtual and actual representation, taxation—it also grappled with questions that continue to be central to democratic life. What is the proper source of political authority? What should be the basis of individuals rights, and how far should those rights extend? If a government’s success depends on the virtue of its citizens, what are the limits and possibilities of human nature? In exploring these questions writers drew on two distinct eighteenth-century literary traditions—the secular, Whig tradition in which critics had voiced opposition to the abuse of political power in England and a religious tradition of moral exhortation that developed out of colonial society’s evangelical Protestantism. Involvement in political debate had been a privilege of educated gentlemen that depended on the importation of expensive books and access to private libraries. From the 1760s, with new newspapers and magazines, an increase in printing in the colonies, and the growth of colleges and “seminaries of learning,” more Americans found the opportunity to publish their views. The Stamp Act, the Townsend duties, the burning of the Gaspee, and the Boston Massacre each provoked a storm of poetry and prose.

Pamphlet Wars. Literary protest in the colonies adapted the imagery and ideas of eighteenth-century English political radicalism. The ideas of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were repeatedly used on both sides of the Atlantic. A pastoral image of rural contentment highlighted the rampant corruption of city politics. Liberty was linked with the progress of civilization while the fate of the ancient empires of Greece and Rome warned how quickly a relaxing of moral discipline could

bring the most brilliant of societies to ruin. Joseph Addison’s popular play Cato (1713) depicted the martyr of Republican Rome who stood against corruption and killed himself rather than submit to the tyranny of Julius Caesar; the play’s lines, celebrating freedom and patriotism were quoted everywhere during the Stamp Act. James Burgh’s Britain’s Remembrancer: or, The Danger Not Yet Over (1746) and Dr. John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757) portrayed the decadence and luxury of the aristocratic class and linked the moral decadence of the Court Ministry with the political tyranny and conspiracy.

Virtue and Simplicity. Finding a wide readership in the colonies, such works furnished Americans with a vocabulary—images of corruption and virtue, phrases such as “inalienable right” and “sons of liberty,” and allegories about the goddess Libertas. In “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies,” published in newspapers from 1767 to 1768 and as a pamphlet in 1768, the lawyer John Dickinson assumed the persona of a simple farmer, a type that recurs frequently in Revolutionary poetry and prose. The narrator’s humble simplicity and rustic virtues lent a tone of moderation and caution to Dickinson’s otherwise seditious advice; although written in reaction to the Townshend duties, “Letters” did more than object to taxation. Imitate ancient Spartans, Dickinson wrote, and the virtues of prudence, bravery, justice, and humanity would allow America to triumph over the “ambitious, artful men” who governed Britain. In exploring the moral requirements for freedom Dickinson’s writing, like most of the polemical literature of the 1760s, retained the learned and legalistic style of rational enlightenment—invoking proportion and balance, appealing to law and history, and assuming that the orderly exchange of ideas might resolve the political issues at hand. Like Dickinson’s “Letters,” the most influential work before the war, revolutionary literature translated theories of government and rights into compelling moral dramas and vivid metaphors, while restraining potentially raw political sentiments within the predictable style of neoclassical literary convention.

Religious Background. While pamphlet literature owed its emphasis on logic and reason to a transatlantic tradition of secular learning in science and moral philosophy, it drew on the native influence of evangelical Protestantism for its emotional appeal. Beginning with the Great Awakening, religious revivalism became the primary arena in which Americans questioned the authority of existing institutions (the clergy and orthodox doctrines) by appealing to the rights, obligations, and freedoms of popular piety. The Puritan Jeremiad furnished a powerful literary tradition of dissent, which made the immediacy of personal danger and collective crisis apparent. In colonial sermons of the 1760s religious faith and political liberty became intertwined with a millennial vision of American history. Commenting on the book of Revelation, Joseph Bellamy’s extremely popular The Millenium (1758) narrates the Second Coming as a peculiarly national deliverance: “a nation shall be born in a day, and all the people shall be righteous.” These sermons taught colonists to associate “salvation” with a general well-being that all citizens would share once their sudden “awakening” led to a sudden liberation from the bondage of corruption into future glories of prosperity. Sermons were clearly the most influential kind of literature that helped to shape Americans’ response to the crises of the Revolutionary era: while some four hundred political pamphlets appeared in the colonies at this time, more than eighteen hundred sermons were printed in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone.

Common Sense. Religious evangelism contributed to the dramatic change in literary tone and style of Revolutionary prose in the 1770s. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776 and selling more than 120,000 copies in three months, had a unique, overwhelming, and immediate impact in the colonies. No literary work had a greater influence in the political affairs of the day, and yet no other piece of writing from the Revolutionary era managed to transcend so successfully its historical moment and become a founding document of the emergence of an American literature. Ironically Paine was an immigrant from England who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774—a fact that perhaps explains his willingness to argue without apology for a complete break with Britain and with the customs of the past in general. Unlike the Whig lawyers who kept their treason within the decorum of erudite learning, Paine dispensed with traditional conceits such as the farmer-narrator and addressed himself directly to ordinary people in the simple and emotional fervor of righteous anger. Independence was no longer an abstract principle to be debated by gentlemen but a birthright of ordinary citizens, and it was to be seized without hesitation or regret.

A New Voice. Blending political and scientific ideas about natural rights and universal laws with millennial urgency, Common Sense describes independence as an accomplished fact and enlists the reader’s patriotism in the most sensational and melodramatic terms. Writing in the wake of the British occupation of Boston, Paine declares that it is too late to turn back from the quest for independence.

But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, on bread to live on? Have you lost a parent of a child by their hands, and your self the ruined and wretched survivor. If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

Paine speaks, in print, to the temper of the urban mobs that, during each crisis from the 1760s, played a dominant role in the colonial challenge to imperial authority. After years of genteel appeals to rational moderation, Common Sense makes the sentiments that circulated in taverns and streets the true source of colonial identity and cultural salvation. In asking every citizen to respond to such outrages, Paine promises like the evangelists that a providential glory awaits the colonies’ break with the king. God will reign over the new republic as “the king of America.” With a confident optimism that anticipates Walt Whitman’s celebration of an American Adam, Paine’s pamphlet convinced many people that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” The radical defiance of existing authority, the demagogic appeal to the crowd, the absolute faith in reinvention, the dignity of common language and experience: these qualities made Common Sense a seminal work in the expression of a new literary voice of democracy.

Sources

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967);

Emory Elliot, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988);

Robert Ferguson, The American Enlightenment 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);

Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).