dEmocratic origins and rEvolutionary WritErs,

1776-1820
The hard-fought American Revolution against
Britain (1775-1783) was the first modern war of
liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of
American independence seemed to many at the
time a divine sign that America and her people
were destined for greatness. Military victory
fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new
literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding
political writing, few works of note appeared
during or soon after the Revolution. American
books were harshly reviewed in England.
Americans were painfully aware of their excessive
dependence on English literary modelsRevolutions
are expressions of the heart of the people; they
grow gradually out of new sensibilities and wealth
of experience. It would take 50 years of
accumulated history for America to earn its
cultural independence and to produce the first
great generation of American writers: Washington
Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt
Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.

THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT The 18th-century

American Enlightenment was a movement marked
by an emphasis on rationality rather than
tradition, scientific inquiry instead of
unquestioning religious dogma, and representative
government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment
thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of
justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of
man. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Benjamin
Franklin, whom the Scottish philosopher David
Hume called America’s “first great man of letters,”
embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane
rationality. Franklin was a second-generation
immigrant. His Puritan father, a chandler
(candlemaker), came to Boston, Massachusetts,
from England in 1683. In many ways Franklin’s life
illustrates the impact of the Enlightenment on a
gifted individual. Never selfish, Franklin tried to
help other ordinary people become successful by
sharing his insights and initiating a
characteristically American genre — the self-help
book.
. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)
Another Enlightenment figure is Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur, whose Letters from an American
Farmer (1782) gave Europeans a glowing idea of
opportunities for peace, wealth, and pride in
America. Neither an American nor a farmer, but a
French aristocrat who owned a plantation outside
New York City before the Revolution, Crèvecoeur
enthusiastically praised the colonies for their
industry, tolerance, and growing prosperity in 12
letters that depict America as an agrarian paradise
— a vision that would inspire Thomas Jefferson,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many other writers up
to the present. Crèvecoeur was the earliest
European to develop a considered view of America
and the new American character. The first to exploit
the “melting pot” image of America, in a famous
passage he asks: What then is the American, this
new man? He is either a European, or the
descendant of a European, hence that strange
mixture of blood, which you will find in no other
country. I could point out to you a family whose
grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was
Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and
whose present four sons have now four wives of
different nations....Here individuals of all nations
are melted into a new race of men, whose labors
and posterity will one day cause changes in the
world.

THE POLITICAL PAMPHLET: Thomas Paine (1737-

1809) The passion of Revolutionary literature is
found in pamphlets, the most popular form of
political literature of the day. Over 2,000
pamphlets were published during the Revolution.
The pamphlets thrilled patriots and threatened
loyalists; they filled the role of drama, as they
were often read aloud in public to excite
audiences. American soldiers read them aloud in
their camps; British Loyalists threw them into
public bonfires. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet
Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the
first three months of its publication.
NEOCLASSISM: EPIC, MOCK EPIC, AND SATIRE
“literary” writing was not as simple and direct as
political writing. When trying to write poetry, most
educated authors stumbled into the pitfall of
elegant neoclassicism. The epic, in particular,
exercised a fatal attraction. American literary
patriots felt sure that the great American
Revolution naturally would find expression in the
epic — a long, dramatic narrative poem in elevated
language, celebrating the feats of a legendary
hero. Many writers tried but none succeeded.
Timothy Dwight, (17521817), one of the group of
writers known as the Hartford Wits, is an example.
Dwight, who eventually became the president of
Yale University, based his epic, The Conquest of
Canaan (1785), on the Biblical story of Joshua’s
struggle to enter the Promised Land. Dwight’s epic
was as boring as it was ambitious. English critics
demolished it; even Dwight’s friends, such as John
Trumbull (1750-1831), remained unenthusiastic.
Not surprisingly, satirical poetry fared much better
than serious verse. The mock epic genre
encouraged American poets to use their natural
voices and did not lure them into a bog of
pretentious and predictable patriotic sentiments
and faceless
.

POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Philip

Freneau (1752-1832) One poet, Philip Freneau,
incorporated the new stirrings of European
Romanticism and escaped the imitativeness and
vague universality of the Hartford Wits. The key to
both his success and his failure was his passionately
democratic spirit combined with an inflexible
temper. The Hartford Wits, all of them undoubted
patriots, reflected the general cultural conservatism
of the educated classes. Freneau set himself against
this holdover of old Tory attitudes, complaining of
“the writings of an aristocratic, speculating faction
at Hartford, in favor of monarchy and titular
distinctions.” Although Freneau received a fine
education and was as well acquainted with the
classics as any Hartford Wit, he embraced liberal
and democratic causes. From a Huguenot (radical
French Protestant) background, Freneau fought as a
militiaman during the Revolutionary War. In 1780,
he was captured and imprisoned in two British
ships, where he almost died before his family
managed to get him released. His poem “The British
Prison Ship” is a bitter condemnation of the
cruelties of the British, who wished “to stain the
world with gore.” This piece and other
revolutionary works, including “Eutaw Springs,”
“American Liberty,” “A Political Litany,” “A Midnight
Consultation,” and “George the Third’s Soliloquy,”
brought him fame as the “Poet of the american
revolution.
Revolution.” Freneau edited a number of journals
during his life, always mindful of the great cause of
democracy. When Thomas Jefferson helped him
establish the militant, anti-Federalist National
Gazette in 1791, Freneau became the first powerful,
crusading newspaper editor in America, and the
literary predecessor of William Cullen Bryant,
William Lloyd Garrison, and H.L. Mencken. As a poet
and editor, Freneau adhered to his democratic
ideals. His popular poems, published in newspapers
for the average reader, regularly celebrated
American subjects. “The Virtue of Tobacco”
concerns the indigenous plant, a mainstay of the
southern economy, while “The Jug of Rum”
celebrates the alcoholic drink of the West Indies, a
crucial commodity of early American trade and a
major New World export.

WRITERS OF FICTION The 18th- centry American

Enlightenment was a movement marked by an
emphasis on rationality rather than tradition,
scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious
dogma, and representative government in place of
monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were
devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality
as the natural rights of man. The first important
fiction writers widely recognized today, Charles
Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and James
Fenimore Cooper, used American subjects,
historical perspectives, themes of change, and
nostalgic tones. They wrote in many prose genres,
initiated new forms, and found new ways to make a
living through literature. With them, American
literature began to be read and appreciated in the
United States and abroad Charles Brockden Brown
(1771-1810) Already mentioned as the first
professional American writer, Charles Brockden
Brown was inspired by the English writers Mrs.
Radcliffe and English William Godwin. (Radcliffe was
known for her terrifying Gothic novels; a novelist
and social reformer, Godwin was the father of Mary
Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein and married
English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.) Driven by
poverty, Brown hastily penned four haunting novels
in two years: Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn
(1799), Ormond (1799), and Edgar Huntley (1799).
In them, he developed the genre of American
Gothic. The Gothic novel was a popular genre of the
day featuring exotic and wild settings, disturbing
psychological depth, and much suspense. Trappings
included ruined castles or abbeys, ghosts,
mysterious secrets, threatening figures, and solitary
maidens who survive by their wits and spiritual
strength. At their best, such novels offer
tremendous suspense and hints of magic, along
with profound explorations of the human soul in
extremity. Critics suggest that Brown’s Gothic
sensibility expresses deep anxieties about the
inadequate social institutions of the new nation.
Brown used distinctively American settings. A man
of ideas, he dramatized scientific theories,
developed a personal theory of fiction, and
championed high literary standards despite
personal poverty. Though flawed, his works are
darkly powerful. Increasingly, he is seen as the
precursor of romantic writers like Edgar Allan Poe,
Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. bocker
School”).
WOMEN AND MINORITIES Although the colonial
period produced several women writers of note,
the revolutionary era did not further the work of
women and minorities, despite the many schools,
magazines, newspapers, and literary clubs that
were springing up. Colonial women such as Anne
Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Ann Cotton, and
Sarah Kemble Knight exerted considerable social
and literary influence in spite of primitive conditions
and dangers; of the 18 women who came to
America on the ship Mayflower in 1620, only four
survived the first year. When every able-bodied
person counted and conditions were fluid, innate
talent could find expression. But as cultural
institutions became formalized in the new republic,
women and minorities gradually were excluded
from them. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) Given
the hardships of life in early America, it is ironic that
some of the best poetry of the period was written
by an exceptional slave woman. The first African-
American author of importance in the United
States, Phillis Wheatley was born in Africa and
brought to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was
about seven, where she was purchased by the pious
and wealthy tailor John Wheatley to be a
companion for his wife. The Wheatleys recognized
Phillis’s remarkable intelligence and, with the help
of their daughter, Mary, Phillis learned to read and
write. Wheatley’s poetic themes are religious, and
her style, like that of Philip Freneau, is neoclassical.
Among her best-known poems are “To S.M., a
Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,” a
poem of praise and encouragement for another
talented black, and a short poem showing her
strong religious sensitivity filtered through her
experience of Christian conversion. This poem
unsettles some contemporary critics — whites
because they find it conventional, and blacks
because the poem does not protest the immorality
of slavery. Yet the work is a sincere expression; it
confronts white racism and asserts spiritual
equality. Indeed, Wheatley was the first to address
such issues confidently in verse, as in “On Being
Brought from Africa to America”: ’Twas mercy
brought me from my Pagan land Taught my
benighted soul to understand That there’s a God,
that there’s a Savior too; Once I redemption neither
sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with
scornful eye, “Their colour is a diabolic dye.”
Remember, Christians, negroes, black as Cain, May
be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train. Other Women
Writers A number of accomplished
Revolutionaryera women writers have been
rediscovered by feminist scholars. Susanna Rowson
(c. 1762-1824) was one of America’s first
professional novelists. Her seven novels included
the best-selling seduction story Charlotte Temple
(1791). She treats feminist and abolitionist themes
and depicts American Indians with respect. Another
long-forgotten novelist was Hannah Foster (1758-
1840), whose best-selling novel The Coquette
(1797) was about a young woman torn between
virtue and temptation. Rejected by her sweetheart,
a cold man of the church, she is seduced,
abandoned, bears a child, and dies alone. Judith
Sargent Murray (1751-1820) published under a
man’s name to secure serious attention for her
works. Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) was a poet,
historian, dramatist, satirist, and patriot. She held
pre-Revolutionary gatherings in her home, attacked
the British in her racy plays, and wrote the only
contemporary radical history of the American
revolution. Letters between women such as Mercy
Otis Warren and Abigail Adams, and letters
generally, are important documents of the period.
For example, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband,
John Adams (later the second president of the
United States), in 1776 urging that women’s
independence be guaranteed in the future U.S.
constitution.