A third type of pamphlet — besides those that surrounded the great public events and those that appeared in polemical series — was distinguished by the ritualistic character of its themes and language. In the course of the Revolutionary controversy, the regular, usually annual, publication in pamphlet form of commemorative orations came to constitute a significant addition to the body of Revolutionary literature. In an earlier period such publications had consisted mainly of sermons delivered on election day in New England, together with a few of those preached on official thanksgiving and fast days, and public letters addressed to “freeholders and qualified voters” that appeared regularly on the eve of the annual elections. But from the mid-1760’s on, celebrations of more secular anniversaries were added: the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act, of the Boston Massacre, of the landing of the Pilgrims, and of an increasing number of fast and thanksgiving days marking political rather than religious events.7
Such commemorative orations were stylized; but in the heat of controversy the old forms took on new vigor, new relevance and meaning: some of the resulting pamphlets of this type have remarkable force and originality. Massachusetts and Connecticut had been publishing sermons preached on election days for one hundred years before Independence; by 1760 these pamphlets had arrived not only at an apparent fulfillment in style but, in content, at a classically monitorial attitude to political authority as well. Yet Andrew Eliot’s use of the familiar formulas in his election sermon of 1765 infused them with more direct power and gave them new point; for to proclaim from the pulpit in the year of the Stamp Act and before the assembled magistrates of Massachusetts that when tyranny is abroad “submission … is a crime” was an act of political defiance strengthened rather than weakened by the sanction of time and tradition the words had acquired. Similarly the title of John Carmichael’s Artillery Company sermon, A Self-Defensive War Lawful, though it merely repeated a traditional phrase, was, in 1775, in itself provocative; and the concluding passage of the pamphlet constitutes a significant transition in which clichés about the duties of Christian soldiers acquire the fervor of battlefield prayers. And if one of the later commemorative celebrations, that of the Boston Massacre, quickly became the occasion for the outpouring of some of the most lurid and naive rhetoric heard in eighteenth-century America, another of them, a thanksgiving day appointed by the Continental Congress, inspired an obscure Salem parson to write, in the most dignified and moving prose, a paean to the promise of American life, and to devise an original blend of theological and constitutional principles. Everywhere in New England, clerical orators celebrating these anniversary events invoked the power of the ancient “jeremiad” to argue that “any vindication of provincial privileges was inextricably dependent upon a moral renovation.”8
Not all the pamphlets, of course, fall into these three categories. Some, like the Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders … of … Boston (1772), written for circulation in pamphlet form, were in themselves political events to which other pamphleteers responded. Others, like Jefferson’s Summary View … (1774), written as an instruction to the Virginia delegates to the first Continental Congress, were political “position” papers. And in addition there were literary pieces — poems like John Trumbull’s M’Fingal and plays like Mercy Otis Warren’s The Blockheads and The Group — which, though manifestly political, sprang from more deeply personal inspiration.
Expressing vigorous, polemical, and more often than not considered views of the great events of the time; proliferating in chains of personal vituperation; and embodying to the world the highly charged sentiments uttered on commemorative occasions, pamphlets appeared year after year and month after month in the crisis of the 1760’s and 1770’s. More than 400 of them bearing on the Anglo-American controversy were published between 1750 and 1776; over 1,500 appeared by 1783.9 Explanatory as well as declarative, and expressive of the beliefs, attitudes, and motivations as well as of the professed goals of those who led and supported the Revolution, the pamphlets are the distinctive literature of the Revolution. They reveal, more clearly than any other single group of documents, the contemporary meaning of that transforming event.
Important above all else as expressions of the ideas, attitudes, and motivations that lay at the heart of the Revolution, the pamphlets published in the two decades before Independence are primarily political, not literary, documents. But form and substance are never wholly separate. The literary qualities of the pamphlets are also important, not only in themselves but for what they reveal of the people who wrote them, their goals and style of mind.
These pamphlets form part of the vast body of English polemical and journalistic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to which the greatest men of letters contributed. Milton, Halifax, Locke, Swift, Defoe, Bolingbroke, Addison were all pamphleteers at least to the extent that Bland, Otis, Dickinson, the Adamses, Wilson, and Jefferson were. But there are striking differences in the quality of the British and American polemical writings considered simply as literature.
The differences do not lie in the presence or absence of literary techniques. One of the surprising aspects of the American writings is the extent to which they include the stylistic modes associated with the great age of English pamphleteering. Of satire, the protean artifice that dominated the most creative pamphleteering of the time, one scholar has identified no fewer than 530 examples published in America during the period 1763–1783; a large percentage of these appeared originally, or were reprinted, in pamphlets.10 In addition to satire there is an abundance of other devices: elusive irony and flat parody; extended allegory and direct vituperation; sarcasm, calculated and naive. All the standard tropes and a variety of unusual figurations may be found in the pamphlet literature.
The results are at times remarkable. Who has ever heard of Ebenezer Chaplin? He was parson of the second parish of the town of Sutton, Massachusetts, in the years before the Revolution; in conventional form he preached regularly and published occasionally on the problems of the church. But in a sermon published as a pamphlet in 1773 he suddenly revealed a remarkably self-conscious literary bent. The sermon is entitled The Civil State Compared to Rivers, and in it Chaplin managed for the better part of twenty-four pages to sustain the single simile announced in the title; the figure winds steadily through the argument, dramatizing it, coloring it, raising the aesthetic level of the piece far above what could have been attained by direct exposition. It is a noteworthy literary invention, and it gleams amid the hundreds of artistically drab sermons of the period.11
Similarly unexpected in its literary effects, though of a quite different genre, is Philip Livingston’s Other Side of the Question, which appeared in the heavy bombardment of polemics of 1774. Where most of the writers in those exchanges used invective, Livingston used ironic ridicule, and he did so with such agility and lightness of touch that a device reminiscent of Tristram Shandy fits in naturally; two scatological passages seem normal exaggerations of a smart and worldly style.12
Effective in another way is the extended sham of a Christian catechism that was published anonymously in 1771 as an attack on sycophantic officemongering. No work of genius, it nevertheless gave a twist of originality to a familiar theme, exaggerating the abjectness of bought loyalty by its burlesque of sacred obligations. In a somewhat similar vein is what has been described as “the most ambitious and nearly successful of half a dozen Biblical imitations which appeared in the Revolutionary period,” The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times, a parody in six parts of an entire book of the Bible. It is so complete in its plot and characterization as to make identification of people and places an engaging puzzle. By its extensiveness and detail, by the sheer number of its imaginative touches, it attains a considerable effect.13
In other ways, by other devices, literary effects were sought and achieved. The most commonly attempted was the satire associated with pseudonymous authorship. Governor Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, for exampl
e, fell upon the opportunity offered to him when his antagonist, Judge Martin Howard, Jr., characterized him as a “ragged country fellow”; he replied with an earthy, vicious attack which he justified by the argument that rags go together with a crude directness of speech. And Richard Bland, in what was probably the most intricate literary conceit written in the entire period, succeeded to such an extent in ridiculing his antagonist by reversing roles with him and condemning him from his own mouth that his victim was forced to reply weakly by explaining to his readers who was really who. Even the more common and transparent forms of pseudonymity provided an opportunity for literary invention. The pastoral pose was more useful to the Reverend Samuel Seabury, arguing the case for the agrarian interests in New York against nonimportation, than it had been to the most famous “farmer” of them all, John Dickinson; it provided not only a consistent point of view but figures of speech and the opportunity for fanciful self-characterization.14
All sorts of literary twists and turns were used. Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s The American Querist, one of the most popular of the Tory pamphlets, consisted of an even one hundred rhetorical questions aimed at the pretensions of the first Continental Congress; the queries were printed for emphasis as one hundred separate paragraphs spread across twenty-one octavo pages. Elephantine footnoting attached to nine stanzas of lampooning verse was the form one response took to Mayhew’s extended attacks on the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Dramatic dialogues — “Between the Ghost of General Montgomery, Just Arrived from the Elysian Fields, and An American Delegate”; “Between a Southern Delegate and His Spouse” — were convenient frames for lurid caricatures, and since they made fewer demands on the skills of the dramatist, they were on the whole more successful than the half-dozen more fully evolved plays that were written for pamphlet publication.15
And all the detailed linguistic tactics of the classic era of English pamphleteering were present. The pamphlets abound in aphorisms: a section of one sermon is in effect nothing but a mosaic of aphorisms.16 There are apostrophes, hyperboles, and vivid personifications. There are subtle transitions that seek to ease the flow of thought, and others contrived to interrupt it, to surprise and fix attention. Even the most crudely bombastic harangues contain artful literary constructions.
And yet, for all of this — for all of the high self-consciousness of literary expression, the obvious familiarity with cosmopolitan models and the armory of sophisticated belles-lettres — the pamphlets of the American Revolution that seek artistic effects are not great documents. Next to the more artful pamphlets of eighteenth-century England they are pallid, imitative, and crude. And the higher, the more technically demanding the mode of expression, the more glaring the contrast. There is nothing in the American literature that approaches in sheer literary skill such imaginatively conceived and expertly written pamphlets as Swift’s Modest Proposal and Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters; there is no allegory as masterful as Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull, and no satire as deft as his Art of Political Lying. Indeed, there are not many of the American pamphlets that are as successful in technique as any number of the less imaginative, straight expository essays published in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England, essays of which Shebbeare’s Letter to the People of England, lamenting corruption and excoriating the mismanagement of Braddock’s expedition, may be taken as average in quality and Swift’s Conduct of the Allies as a notable refinement. Why this should be so — why the more imaginative and self-consciously literary of the pamphlets of the Revolution should be manifestly inferior in quality to the English models — is an important even if not a wholly answerable question. For it helps locate and explain the qualities of these documents that are of the greatest distinction.
First and foremost, the American pamphleteers, though participants in a great tradition, were amateurs next to such polemicists as Swift and Defoe. Nowhere in the relatively undifferentiated society of colonial America had there developed before 1776 a group of penmen professional in the sense that Defoe or Franklin’s friend James Ralph were professional: capable, that is, of earning their living by their pens, capable of producing copy on order as well as on inspiration, and taught by the experience of dozens of polemical encounters the limits and possibilities of their craft. The closest to having attained such professionalism in the colonies were a few of the more prominent printers; but with the exception of Franklin they did not transcend the ordinary limitations of their trade: they were rarely principals in the controversies of the time. The American pamphleteers were almost to a man lawyers, ministers, merchants, or planters heavily engaged in their regular occupations. For them political writing was an uncommon diversion, peripheral to their main concerns. They wrote easily and readily, but until the crisis of Anglo-American affairs was reached, they had had no occasion to turn out public letters, tracts, and pamphlets in numbers at all comparable to those of the English pamphleteers. The most experienced polemical writer in the colonies was probably William Livingston of New York, who, together with two or three of his friends, had sustained The Independent Reflector through enough issues in 1752 and 1753 to fill one good-sized volume.17 But Swift’s formal prose work alone fills fourteen volumes, and Defoe is known to have written at least 400 tracts, pamphlets, and books: his contributions to a single periodical during a ten year period total 5,000 printed pages, and they represent less than half of what he wrote in those years. It appears to have been no great matter for a professional like James Ralph, who attained success as a paid political writer after years of effort in poetry, drama, and criticism and who late in life published an eloquent Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, to turn out, amid a stream of pamphlets and periodical pieces, a massive History of England whose bibliographical and critical introduction alone covers 1,078 folio pages.18
No American writer in the half century between the death of Cotton Mather and the Declaration of Independence had anything like such experience in writing; and it is this amateurism, this lack of practiced technique, that explains much of the crudeness of the Revolutionary pamphlets considered simply as literature. For while the colonial writers were obviously acquainted with and capable of imitating the forms of sophisticated polemics, they had not truly mastered them; they were rarely capable of keeping their literary contrivances in control. All of the examples cited above for their literary qualities (and as self-conscious artistic efforts they are among the most noteworthy documents of the group) suffer from technical weaknesses. By virtue of its extended simile Chaplin’s Civil State shines among the sermons of the time, but in the end the effect is almost overcome by insistence; the figure is maintained too long; it becomes obtrusive, and the reader ends more aware of it than of the thought it is supposed to be illuminating. The Ministerial Catechism lacks the verbal cleverness necessary to keep it from falling into a jog-trotting substitution-play of words. And while The First Book of … American Chronicles is a more intricate and extended burlesque, its diction, one critic has noted, “has a synthetic ring and at one point a brief passage of French dialect is jarring.”19 Most of the pseudonymous poses, including Hopkins’ cited above, were transparent to begin with, and they were unevenly, even sloppily, maintained; often they were simply cast aside after the opening passages, to be snatched up again hurriedly at the end in a gesture of literary decorousness. Even Bland, as artful a litterateur as America produced in the period, was incapable of fully controlling his own invention. If his elaborate conceit threw his intended victim into confusion, it must have had a similar effect on many of its other readers, for at times the point is almost lost in a maze of true and facetious meanings. Chandler’s Querist is notably original, but strings of syntactically identical questions can become monotonous unless their contents are unusually clever; fifty of them are almost certain to become wearying; Chandler’s one hundred will exhaust the patience of any reader.
And these are among the strongest of the efforts made to attain literary effects. The weakest a
re, on technical grounds, quite remarkably bad. The poetry — or, more accurately, the versification — is almost uniformly painful to read. There is scarcely a single group of stanzas that can be read with any satisfaction as poetry. Most of the verses are a kind of limping jingle-jangle in which sense and sound are alternatively sacrificed to each other, and both, occasionally, to the demands of termination. The dramatic dialogues, whatever their political importance might be, as literary expressions are wooden and lifeless. And the plays, especially the verse plays, are almost totally devoid of characterization or any other form of verisimilitude.
But there is more than amateurism behind the relative crudeness of the artistic efforts in the American pamphlets. For if writers like Adams and Jefferson were amateur pamphleteers, their writings in other ways display formidable literary talents. Jefferson had an extraordinary gift for supple and elegant if abstract expression; it was well known and appreciated at the time. And Adams, seemingly so stolid and unimaginative an embodiment of prosaic virtues, had a basically sensuous apprehension of experience which he expressed in brilliantly idiomatic and figurative prose — but in diary notations and in letters. Neither, as pamphleteers, sought literary effects: Jefferson’s sole effort is a straightforward if gracefully written political policy statement, and Adams’ major piece is a treatise on government.20
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 4