Chapter II: Part 2

Of the six sons of Richard Mather, four became famous preachers, two of them in Ireland and in England, other two in New England; the greatest of them all being the youngest, born at Dorchester, June 21, 1639, and at his birth adorned with the name of Increase, in graceful recognition of “the increase of every sort, wherewith God favoured the country about the time of his nativity.” Even in childhood he began to display the strong and eager traits that gave distinction and power to his whole life, and that bore him impetuously through the warfare of eighty-four mortal years. In 1657, on his eighteenth birthday, he preached in his father’s pulpit his first sermon. From 1661 to 1664 he divided his services between his father’s church at Dorchester and the North Church of Boston. At last, in 1664, he consented to be made minister of the latter church, which, thenceforward, to the end of his own life, and to the end of the life of his more famous son, continued to be the tower and the stronghold of the Mathers in America. Here, then, was a person, born in America, bred in America,--a clean specimen of what America could do for itself in the way of keeping up the brave stock of its first imported citizens. As to learning, he even exceeded all other New Englanders of the colonial time, except his own son, Cotton. His power as a pulpit-orator was very great. It was a common saying of his contemporaries, that Increase Mather was “a complete preacher.” From a literary point of view, his writings certainly have considerable merit. The publications of Increase Mather defy mention, except in the form of a catalogue. From the year 1669, when he had reached the age of thirty, until the year 1723, when he died, hardly a twelvemonth was permitted to pass in which he did not solicit the public attention through the press. An authentic list of his works would include at least ninety-two titles. Of all the great host of Increase Mather’s publications, perhaps only one can be said to have still any power of walking alive on the earth,--the book commonly known by a name not given to it by the author, _Remarkable Providences_. It cannot be denied that the conception of the book is thoroughly scientific; for it is to prove by induction the actual presence of supernatural forces in the world. Its chief defect, of course, is its lack of all cross-examination of the witnesses, and of all critical inspection of their testimony, together with a palpable eagerness on the author’s part to welcome, from any quarter of the earth or sea or sky, any messenger whatever who may be seen hurrying toward Boston with his mouth full of marvels.

In the intellectual distinction of the Mather family, there seemed to be, for at least three generations, a certain cumulative felicity. The general acknowledgment of this fact is recorded in an old epitaph, composed for the founder of the illustrious tribe:

Under this stone lies Richard Mather,
Who had a son greater than his father,
And eke a grandson greater than either.

This overtopping grandson was, of course, none other than Cotton Mather, the literary behemoth of New England in our colonial era; the man whose fame as a writer surpasses, in later times and especially in foreign countries, that of any other pre-Revolutionary American, excepting Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. The most famous book produced by him--the most famous book, likewise, produced by any American during the colonial time--is _Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698_. The Magnalia is, indeed, what the author called it, “a bulky thing,”--the two volumes of the latest edition having upwards of thirteen hundred pages. The _Magnalia_ has great merits; it has, also, fatal defects. In its mighty chaos of fables and blunders and misrepresentations, are of course lodged many single facts of the utmost value, personal reminiscences, social gossip, snatches of conversations, touches of description, traits of character and life, that can be found nowhere else, and that help us to paint for ourselves some living picture of the great men and the great days of early New England; yet herein, also, history and fiction are so jumbled and shuffled together that it is never possible to tell, without other help than the author’s, just where the fiction ends and the history begins. On no disputed question of fact is the unaided testimony of Cotton Mather of much weight. The true place of Cotton Mather in our literary history is indicated when we say that he was the last, the most vigorous, and, therefore, the most disagreeable representative of the Fantastic School in literature; and that he prolonged in New England the methods of that school even after his most cultivated contemporaries there had outgrown them, and had come to dislike them. The expulsion of the beautiful from thought, from sentiment, from language; a lawless and a merciless fury for the odd, the disorderly, the grotesque, the violent; strained analogies, unexpected images, pedantries, indelicacies, freaks of allusion, monstrosities of phrase;--these are the traits of Cotton Mather’s writing, even as they are the traits common to that perverse and detestable literary mood that held sway in different countries of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its birthplace was Italy; New England was its grave; Cotton Mather was its last great apostle.

Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton Mather, was born in 1706. In him, evidently, the ancestral fire had become almost extinct. He had abundant learning; was extremely industrious; published many things; but there was not in them, as there was not in him, the victorious energy of an original mind, or even the winning felicity of an imitative one. He was a sturdy and a worthy man. He left no successor to continue the once-splendid dynasty of his tribe. He was the last, and the least, of the Mathers.

_The Laity in New England Literature._--In the history of literature in New England during the colonial time, one fact stands out above all others,--the intellectual leadership of the clergy, and that, too, among a laity neither ignorant nor weak. This leadership was in every sense honourable, both for the leaders and the led. It was not due alone to the high authority of the clerical office in New England; it was due still more to the personal greatness of the men who filled that office, and who themselves made the office great. They were intellectual leaders because they deserved to be; for, living among a well-educated and high-spirited people, they knew more, were wiser, were abler, than all other persons in the community. Of such a leadership, it was an honour even to be among the followers. And in the literary achievements of New England in the colonial time, the clergy filled by far the largest space, because, in all departments of writing, they did by far the largest amount of work. After the first half-century of New England life, another fact comes into notice,--the advance of the laity in literary activity. By that time, many strong and good men, who had been educated there in all the learning of the age, either not entering the clerical profession or not remaining in it, began to organise and to develop the other learned professions--the legal, medical, and tuitionary--and, appealing to the public through various forms of literature, to divide more and more with the clergy the leadership of men’s minds. Moreover, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, an attempt was made to establish a newspaper in New England. The attempt failed. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, another attempt was made, and did not fail; and long before the end of our colonial epoch, a new profession had come into existence, having a power to act on the minds of men more mightily than any other,--the profession of journalism.

_The Almanac._--No one who would penetrate to the core of early American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac. The earliest record of this species of literature in America carries us back to the very beginning of printed literature in America; for, next after a sheet containing _The Freeman’s Oath_, the first production that came from the printing-press in this country was _An Almanac calculated for New England, by Mr. Pierce_, and printed at Cambridge, in 1639. Thenceforward for a long time, scarcely a year passed over that solitary printing-press at Cambridge without receiving a similar salute from it. In 1676, Boston itself grew wise enough to produce an almanac of its own. Ten years afterward, Philadelphia began to send forth almanacs--a trade in which, in the following century, it was to acquire special glory. In 1697, New York entered the same enticing field of enterprise. The first almanac produced in Rhode Island was in 1728; the first almanac produced in Virginia was in 1731. In 1733, Benjamin Franklin began to publish what he called _Poor Richard’s Almanac_, to which his own personal reputation has given a celebrity surpassing that of all other almanacs published anywhere in the world. Thus, year by year, with the multiplication of people and of printing-presses in this country, was there a multiplication of almanacs, some of them being of remarkable intellectual and even literary merit. Throughout our colonial time, when larger books were costly and few, the almanac had everywhere a hearty welcome and frequent perusal.

_History and Biography in New England._--The one form of secular literature for which, during the entire colonial age, the writers of New England had the most authentic vocation is history. Our second literary period produced four considerable historians,--William Hubbard, Cotton Mather, Thomas Prince, Thomas Hutchinson: the first two excelling in popularity all other historians of the colonial time; the last two excelling all others in specific training for the profession of history, and in the conscious accumulation of materials for historic work. Of that species of history which is devoted to the lives of individuals rather than of communities, there were many specimens produced in the colonial epoch. But it is a singular fact that, in literary quality, the biographies written in colonial New England are far inferior to its histories.

_Pulpit Literature in New England._--In our progress over the various fields of literature in New England during the colonial time, we encounter not one form of writing in which we are permitted to lose sight of the clergy of New England,--their tireless and versatile activity, their learning, their force of brain, their force of character. The immigrant clergy of New England--the founders of this noble and brilliant order--were, in nearly all qualities of personal worth and greatness, among the greatest and the worthiest of their time, in the mother-country,--mighty scholars, orators, sages, saints. And by far the most wonderful thing about these men is, that they were able to convey across the Atlantic, into a naked wilderness, all the essential elements of that ancient civilisation out of which they came; and, at once, to raise up and educate, in the New World, a line of mighty successors in their sacred office, without the least break in the sequence, without the slightest diminution in scholarship, in eloquence, in intellectual energy, in moral power.

_Jonathan Edwards._--Jonathan Edwards, the most original and acute thinker yet produced in America, was born in 1703; in 1758 he was installed as president of the College of New Jersey, and died a few weeks afterward. Both by his father and by his mother, he came of the gentlest and most intellectual stock in New England. In early childhood, he began to manifest those powerful, lofty, and beautiful endowments, of mind and of character, that afterward distinguished him,--spirituality, conscientiousness, meekness, simplicity, disinterestedness, and a marvellous capacity for the acquisition of knowledge and for the prosecution of independent thought. It is, perhaps, impossible to name any department of intellectual exertion, in which, with suitable outward facilities, he might not have achieved supreme distinction. Certainly, he did enough to show that had he given himself to mathematics, or to physical science, or to languages, or to literature--especially the literature of imagination and of wit--he would have become one of the world’s masters. The traditions of his family, the circumstances of his life, the impulses derived from his education and from the models of personal greatness before his eyes, all led him to give himself to mental science and divinity; and in mental science and divinity, his achievements will be remembered to the end of time.

III. GENERAL LITERARY FORCES IN THE COLONIAL TIME

_Colonial Isolation._--The study of American literature in the colonial time is the study of a literature produced, in isolated portions, at the several local seats of English civilisation in America. Before the year 1765, we find in this country, not one American people, but many American peoples. At the various centres of our colonial life--Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts--there were, indeed, populations of the same English stock; but these populations differed widely in personal and social peculiarities--in spirit, in opinion, in custom. The germs of a future nation were here, only they were far apart, unsympathetic, at times even unfriendly. No cohesive principle prevailed, no centralising life; each little nation was working out its own destiny in its own fashion. In general, the characteristic note of American literature in the colonial time is, for New England, scholarly, logical, speculative, unworldly, rugged, sombre; and as one passes southward along the coast, across other spiritual zones, this literary note changes rapidly toward lightness and brightness, until it reaches the sensuous mirth, the satire, the persiflage, the gentlemanly grace, the amenity, the jocular coarseness, of literature in Maryland, Virginia, and the farther South.

_Colonial Fellowship._--On the other hand, the fact must not be overlooked that, while the tendency toward colonial isolation had its way, throughout the entire colonial age, there was also an opposite tendency--a tendency toward colonial fellowship--that asserted itself even from the first, and yet at the first faintly, but afterward with steadily increasing power as time went on; until at last, in 1765, aided by a fortunate blunder in the statesmanship of England, this tendency became suddenly dominant, and led to that united and great national life, without which a united and great national literature here would have been for ever impossible. This august fact of fellowship between the several English populations in America--a fellowship maintained and even strengthened after the original occasion of it had ceased--has perhaps saved the English language in America from finally breaking up into a multitude of mutually repellent dialects; it has certainly saved American literature from the pettiness of permanent local distinctions, from fitfulness in its development, and from disheartening limitations in its audience. Besides these general causes leading toward colonial union,--kinship, religion, commerce, dependence on the same sovereign, peril from the same enemies,--there were three other causes that may be described as purely intellectual--the rise of journalism, the founding of colleges, and the study of physical science. They worked strongly for the development of that intercolonial fellowship without which no national literature would ever have been born here, and, also, were in themselves literary forces of extraordinary importance.

_Early American Journalism._--The first newspaper ever published in America appeared in Boston in 1690, and was named _Public Occurrences_. For the crime of uttering “reflections of a very high nature,” it was immediately extinguished by the authorities of Massachusetts,--not even attaining the dignity of a second number. Under this rough blow, the real birth of American journalism hesitated for fourteen years. On April 4, 1704, was published in Boston the first number of an American newspaper that lived. It was called _The Boston News-Letter_. For fifteen years, it continued to be the only newspaper in America. At last, on December 21, 1719, a rival newspaper was started, named _The Boston Gazette_; and on the twenty-second day of the same month, in the same year, there appeared in Philadelphia the first newspaper published in this country outside of Boston. This was called _The American Weekly Mercury_. From that time onward, the fashion of having newspapers spread rapidly. Nearly all of these newspapers were issued once each week; many of them were on diminutive sheets; and for a long time all of them clung to the prudent plan of publishing only news and advertisements, abstaining entirely from the audacity of an editorial opinion, or disguising that dangerous luxury under pretended letters from correspondents. News from Europe,--when it was to be had,--and especially news from England, occupied a prominent place in these little papers; but, necessarily, for each one, the affairs of its own colony, and next, the affairs of the other colonies, furnished the principal items of interest. Thus it was that early American journalism, even though feeble, sluggish, and timid, began to lift the people of each colony to a plane somewhat higher than its own boundaries, and to enable them, by looking abroad, this way and that, upon the proceedings of other people in this country, and upon other interests as precious as their own, to correct the pettiness and the selfishness of mere localism in thought. Colonial journalism was a necessary and a great factor in the slow process of colonial union. Besides this, our colonial journalism soon became, in itself, a really important literary force. It could not remain for ever a mere disseminator of public gossip, or a placard for the display of advertisements. The instinct of critical and brave debate was strong even among those puny editors, and it kept struggling for expression. Moreover, each editor was surrounded by a coterie of friends, with active brains and a propensity to utterance; and these constituted a sort of unpaid staff of editorial contributors, who, in various forms,--letters, essays, anecdotes, epigrams, poems, lampoons,--helped to give vivacity and even literary value to the paper.

Our early journalism, likewise, included publications of a more explicit literary intention than the newspapers; publications in which the original work was done with far greater care, and in which far more space was surrendered to literary news and literary criticism, and to the exercise of many sorts of literary talent. The generic name for these publications is the magazine; and the first one issued in this country was by Benjamin Franklin, at Philadelphia, in 1741. By far the most admirable example of our literary periodicals in the colonial time was _The American Magazine_, published at Philadelphia from October, 1757, to October, 1758, and conducted, according to its own announcement, “by a society of gentlemen.”

_Early American Colleges._--No other facts in American history are more creditable to the American people than those which relate to their early and steady esteem for higher education, and especially to their efforts and their sacrifices in the founding of colleges. Before the year 1765, seven colleges were established here: Harvard, in 1636; William and Mary, in 1693; Yale, in 1700; New Jersey, in 1746; King’s--now Columbia--in 1754; Philadelphia--now the University of Pennsylvania--in 1755; Rhode Island--now Brown University--in 1764. Though all these little establishments bore the name of colleges, there were considerable differences among them with respect to the grade and extent of the instruction they furnished,--those founded latest being, in that particular, the most rudimental. Nevertheless, at them all one noble purpose prevailed,--the study of the ancient classics. This extraordinary training in the ancient languages led to forms of proficiency that have no parallel now in American colleges. So early as 1649, President Dunster wrote to Ravius, the famous Orientalist, that some of the students at Harvard could “with ease dexterously translate Hebrew and Chaldee into Greek.” In 1678, there was in that college even an Indian student who wrote Latin and Greek poetry; and this accomplishment continued to be an ordinary one there as late as the Revolutionary War; while the facile use of Latin, whether for conversation or for oratory, was so common among the scholars of Harvard and of Yale as to excite no remark. Nearly all the superior men in public life, after the immigrant generation, were educated at these little colleges; and in all the studies that then engaged the attention of scholars in the Old World, these men, particularly if clergymen, had a scholarship that was, in compass and variety, fully abreast of the learning of the time. The existence here of these early colleges was in many ways a means of colonial fellowship. Each college was itself, in all portions of the country, a point of distinction for its own colony; at each college were gathered some students from other colonies; between all the colleges there grew a sense of fraternity in learning and letters, and this re-enforced the general sense of fraternity in civic destinies; finally, at these colleges was trained no little of that masterly statesmanship of our later colonial time, which, at a glance, interpreted the danger that hung upon the horizon in 1765, proclaimed the imminent need of colonial union, and quickly brought it about. The vast influence that our early colleges exerted upon literary culture can hardly be overstated. Among all the people, they nourished those spiritual conditions out of which, alone, every wholesome and genuine literature must grow; and in their special devotion to classical studies, they imparted to a considerable body of men the finest training for literary work that the world is yet possessed of. It was of incalculable service to American literature that, even in these wild regions of the earth, the accents of Homer, of Thucydides, of Cicero, were made familiar to us from the beginning; that a consciousness of the æsthetic principle in verbal expression was kept alive here, and developed, by constant and ardent study of the supreme masters of literary form; and that the great, immemorial traditions of literature were borne hither across the Atlantic from their ancient seats, and were here housed in perpetual temples, for the rearing of which the people gladly went to great cost. The tribute of most eloquent homage, which, in 1775, in the House of Lords, the Earl of Chatham paid to the intellectual force, the literary symmetry, and the decorum of the state-papers then recently transmitted from America, and then lying upon the table of that House, was virtually an announcement to Europe of the astonishing news,--that, by means of an intellectual cultivation formed in America, in its own little colleges, on the best models of ancient and modern learning, America had already become not only an integral part of the civilised world, but even a member of the republic of letters.

_The Study of Physical Science in America._--The study of physical science in this country began with the very settlement of the country. The writings of the first Americans are strewn with sharp observations on the geography of America, on its minerals, soils, waters, plants, animals; on its climates, storms, earthquakes; on its savage inhabitants, its diseases, its medicines; and on the phenomena of the heavens as they appeared to this part of the earth. There were here, even in our earliest age, several men of special scientific inclination, such as William Wood, John Josselyn, John Sherman, John Winthrop of Massachusetts, and John Winthrop of Connecticut. Indeed, the latter was recognised as an eminent physicist even among the contemporaneous physicists of England; and in Connecticut, where he founded the city of New London, and where he was for many years Governor, he pursued with great zeal his scientific researches, carrying them even into the fatal chase for the philosopher’s stone. He was on terms of endearing intimacy with Watkins, Robert Boyle, and other great leaders of science in England; and it is said that under the menace of public calamities there, and drawn, likewise, by their friendship for Winthrop, these men had proposed to leave England, and to establish in the American colony over which Winthrop presided “a society for promoting natural knowledge.” They were, however, induced by Charles II. to remain in England; and accordingly, with the co-operation of Winthrop, who happened to be in London at the time, they founded there, instead of in New London, the association that soon became renowned throughout the world as the Royal Society. Perhaps there was no one of these early American students of nature whom it is now pleasanter to recall than the Quaker naturalist, John Bartram. Born in Pennsylvania, in 1701, he founded near Philadelphia the first botanic garden in America. He was appointed American botanist to George III., and won from Linnæus the praise of being “the greatest natural botanist in the world.” As John Bartram represents high attainments in science reached under all outward disadvantages, so John Winthrop of Harvard College represents still higher attainments in science reached under all outward advantages. A descendant of the first Governor of Massachusetts, from 1738 until his death in 1779 he served his Alma Mater with great distinction as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. For extent and depth of learning in his special departments, he was probably the foremost American of his day. All things considered, he was probably the most symmetrical example both of scientific and of literary culture produced in America during the colonial time; representing what was highest and broadest in it, what was most robust and most delicate; a thinker and a writer born and bred in a province, but neither in thought nor in speech provincial; an American student of nature and of human nature, who stayed at home, and bringing Europe and the universe to his own door, made himself cosmopolitan.

Thus, from the earliest moment of American civilisation, there were, here and there in this country, eager and keen students of nature,--their number greatly multiplying with the passing of the years. But it belongs to the essence of such studies that they who pursue them should seek the fellowship of their own brethren, either for help in solving difficulties or for delight in announcing discoveries; and it is, beyond question, true that the union of the American colonies was first laid in the friendly correspondence and intellectual sympathies of students of physical science, who from an early day were dispersed through these colonies. By the year 1740, the American students of nature had become a multitude; and from that year to the year 1765, the glory of physical research among us culminated in the brilliant achievements of Benjamin Franklin, whose good fortune it then was to enable his country to step at once to the van of scientific discovery, and for a few years to be the teacher of the world on the one topic of physical inquiry then uppermost in men’s thoughts. In proposing the formation of the American Philosophical Society, this wonderful man had announced to his own countrymen that the time had come for them to make new and greater exertions for the enlargement of human knowledge. Inspired by the noble enthusiasm of Franklin, whose position brought him into large personal acquaintance in all the colonies, the activity and the range of scientific studies in America were then greatly increased,--a bond of scientific communion that helped to prepare the way for political communion, whenever the hour for that should come. The direct impulse given by all this eager study of physical science to the development of American literature is to be seen not only in scientific writings like those of Winthrop and of Franklin, which have high and peculiar literary merit, but in the general invigoration of American thought, in the development of a sturdy rational spirit, and in a broadening of the field of our intellectual vision.

But, in spite of all these influences working toward colonial fellowship, the prevailing fact in American life, down to the year 1765, was colonial isolation. With that year came the immense event that suddenly swept nearly all minds in the several colonies into the same great current of absorbing thought, and that held them there for nearly twenty years. From the date of that event, we cease to concern ourselves with an American literature in the East or the South, in this colony or in that. Henceforward American literature flows in one great, common stream, and not in petty rills of geographical discrimination,--the literature of one multitudinous people, variegated indeed, in personal traits, but single in its commanding ideas and in its national destinies.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD

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.”