Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
splash’d stocking, but money might with more profit be laid out
in repairing the roads, than in marine establishments, supporting
a standing army, useless embassies, exorbitant salaries, given to
many flashy fellows that are no honor to us, or to themselves,
and chartering whole ships to carry a single man to another
nation--Odds my life, continued I, what a number of difficulties a
man labors under, who has never read further than Lilly’s grammar,
and has but a poor brain--had I been favored with a good education,
I could no doubt readily see the _great usefulness_ of all these
measures of government, that now appear to me so unaccountable--I
could then, said I, still talking to myself, see the reason why
the old patriots, whose blood flowed so freely in purchasing our
independence, are cast aside, like a broken pitcher, (as the
Scripture says) and why the old tories and active refugees are
advanced to places of power, honor and trust.[386]
In another writer so whimsical a note would have no other purpose than
to fill a Spectator paper. But the garrulous Robert Slender is Freneau
in quieter vein, pursuing his old purpose. As a social philosopher
his opinions are oddly like those of Tom Paine. In commenting on
the government’s use of the people’s money he was seeking to awaken
interest in the social possibilities of government: that government
would better serve the _res publica_ through internal improvements,
than by creating armies and navies and providing posts and pensions
for great men. This was a fashion of thought which Paine had done much
to spread, and in the midst of a pompous Federalism, when gentlemen
professed to believe that government could acquire reverence in the
people’s eyes only by being hedged about with ceremonial, Robert
Slender’s cogitations were very much to the point. If government were
truly democratized, if it concerned itself with realities, serving the
people in the homely affairs and common needs of everyday life, there
would be no need of aristocratic ceremonial. Like Paine, Freneau was an
idealist, with his head full of ideas which to practical men were only
silly French notions; and yet the idealist, in this matter of the _res
publica_, was the true realist.
For all his Jacobinism Freneau might have been spared some of the
odium that gathered about his head if he had not turned partisan
journalist and put himself in the thick of the fight. In the eighteenth
century the newspaper editor had not yet wholly risen from the rank
of mechanic; he was still a master-printer, with hands much too
ink-stained to pass himself off as a gentleman, and with financial
resources too limited to be intellectually independent. If his paper
were largely literary he made no powerful enemies, but let him enter
politics or seek to mold public opinion on important matters, and he
was likely to meet the fate of John Mein, outspoken editor of the
_Boston Chronicle_, who was destroyed for exposing the weakness of the
merchants’ non-importation policy.[387] Freneau had had considerable
experience in newspaper work at times when his sea life had grown
irksome, but he took no active part in politics until the fall of 1791,
when he set up the _National Gazette_ in Philadelphia, and began that
tumultuous career lasting two years which brought so much abuse upon
him.
The detailed story of his connection with the _Gazette_ is given in an
admirable study,[388] and need not be recounted further than to bring
into relief the bare essentials. Soon after the formation of the new
government Hamilton had provided himself with a newspaper, _The United
States Gazette_, that was an effective advocate of all Hamiltonian
policies. The editor, John Fenno, seems to have been a vigorous fellow,
into whose hands Hamilton threw much of the public printing, and whose
debts he paid when they became pressing. Alarmed at the influence
wielded by the newspaper, Jefferson and Madison approached Freneau,
who had been contemplating a new venture, with the suggestion that
he set up a rival democratic paper. To encourage him Jefferson gave
Freneau a small post as translator in the State Department, worth $250
a year. The _National Gazette_ was thereupon established, and for two
years a war between the hostile papers went on fiercely. If the _United
States Gazette_ lauded the virtues of the English government, extolled
the wisdom of Hamilton and abhorred all Jacobins, the _National
Gazette_ retorted in kind, attacking the Secretary of the Treasury
and applauding the growing Jacobite spirit that struck at every form
of aristocracy. It became the common clearing house for democratic
propaganda, and Freneau’s influence spread so widely that he may justly
be regarded as “the leading editor in America” during those critical
years.
It is quite evident today that “the chief business of the _Gazette_
was to destroy Hamilton.” Probably more largely than any other
writer, Freneau awakened a popular distrust of Federalist men and
measures, which a few years later was to break the party. Jefferson’s
often-quoted remark, “His paper has saved our Constitution _which was
fast galloping into monarchy_, and has been checked by no one means so
powerfully as by that paper,” is somewhat extravagant; nevertheless the
universal detestation in which Freneau was held by all Federalists is
sufficient testimony to his influence. Washington was greatly ruffled
and wanted to remove him from his petty post in the State Department,
but Jefferson would not consent. It seems that Washington felt no
ill-will toward John Fenno, who drew six times the sum from the public
treasury that Freneau received. But Fenno was no democrat, “hostile to
garter, ribbon, crown, and star;” Fenno was no unsparing critic who
would attack even Washington if he lent himself to undemocratic ends;
whereas Freneau was plain-spoken, and no gentleman likes plain speaking
from subordinates.
All this was a hundred years ago and more. The inditers of those
partisan scurrilities, Democrat and Federalist alike, have long since
ceased their bickerings. Words which once stung like a whiplash
have become only echoes of dead passions. As the struggles of those
tumultuous years fall into truer perspective, the figure of Philip
Freneau takes on larger and nobler proportions. The cloud of calumny
that long obscured his virtues is dissipating, and we discover in him
an eager child of an age of democratic aspiration, the friend and
advocate of social justice. Like Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, he
was a notable American, who gave himself unselfishly to the work of
furthering the common well-being. “It was a long and stormy life,” says
Forman, “and it was lived for human rights and human freedom”--
Still on the people’s, still on Freedom’s side;
Still in the cause of man severely true.
After all, the poet in Freneau was deeper than the partisan. Despite
his conviction that a sordid America cared nothing for poetry--that “an
age employed in edging steel can no poetic raptures feel”--his love of
beauty was never killed nor the spring of poetic creation dried up.
In moments of release from cares he found solace in the poetry that
welled up from the unembittered depths of a rich and generous nature.
The portrait drawn by Professor Tyler depicts one side of Freneau; the
following lines, from a very late poem, reveal another:
The world has wrangled half an age,
And we again in war engage,
While this sweet, sequestr’d rill
Murmurs through the valley still....
But, with all your quiet flow,
Do you not some quarrels know!
Lately, angry, how you ran!
All at war--and much like man.
When the shower of waters fell,
How you raged, and what a swell!
All your banks you overflow’d,
Scarcely knew your own abode!
How you battled with the rock!
Gave my willows such a shock
As to menace, by its fall,
Underwood and bushes, all:
Now you are again at peace:
Time will come when that will cease;
Such the human passions are;
--You again will war declare.
Emblem, thou, of restless man;
What a sketch of nature’s plan!
Now at peace, and now at war,
Now you murmur, now you roar;
Muddy now, and limpid next,
Now with icy shackles vext--
What a likeness here we find!
What a picture of mankind![389]
This was the valedictory of Philip Freneau. His life was bitter and
turbulent, cast in a bitter and turbulent age; yet he found some grains
of comfort in the contemplation of nature and the exercise of the
poet’s craft. Through it all his heart remained clean and his hands
unstained. If he was not a great poet whom all the critics praise, he
loved beauty and served it in a careless world among an indifferent
people, and it ill becomes America to forget his contribution or deny
him some portion of the honor that has fallen generously to others no
more deserving.
2. Joel Barlow • Jacobin
That he should have long associated with the Hartford Wits and
collaborated with them in defense of Connecticut Federalism must have
seemed to Joel Barlow in after years the choicest bit of comedy in his
varied career. His subsequent adventures led him far from the strait
path of Yale orthodoxy. In those ripe later years life had pretty well
emptied him of all dogmatisms and taught him the virtue of catholic
sympathies. He had become acquainted with diverse philosophies and
had observed the ways of alien societies, and from such contacts the
horizons of his mind had broadened and his character mellowed. It was
a long road that he traveled from New Haven to his Washington salon.
Born a Connecticut Yankee, he accepted in his youth all the Connecticut
conventions, and graduated from Yale with as complete a stock of
respectable opinions as his classmate Noah Webster. An energetic
capable fellow, he wanted to get on in life. He wanted to be rich and
famous, and he tried many roads that promised to lead to that desirable
goal--law, politics, journalism, poetry, psalmody, speculation. Needing
a job he volunteered soon after graduation as chaplain in the army.
He had not prepared for the ministry and while preaching somewhat
indifferently to ragged soldiers he dreamed of poetic fame, and devoted
more time to his couplets than to pious meditation. His abilities
discovering no more profitable field for exercise than writing verse,
he was pretty much at a stand till chance sent him abroad as agent
for one of the speculative land-companies that were springing up like
mushrooms in post-war America. There he found his opportunity. In
France, where he established his headquarters, he entered a world of
thought vastly different from that of prim little Hartford. It was an
extraordinarily stimulating experience into which he threw himself with
zest. Seventeen years, from 1788 to 1805, he spent abroad on that first
visit, and those years changed the provincial Yankee into one of the
most cosmopolitan Americans of his generation. From a member of the
Hartford Wits, ardent in defense of the traditional Connecticut order,
he had become a citizen of the world, outspoken in defense of the
rights of man.
It was this later Barlow, completely new-outfitted by French romantic
tailors, that after years remember and that early friends could
not forgive. In adopting the Jacobin mode and setting himself to
the serious business of political thinking, he invited the caustic
criticism of his former associates; yet nothing in his life was more
creditable or marks him more definitely as an open-minded, intelligent
man. He was as receptive to new ideas as Timothy Dwight was impervious.
He plunged boldly into the maelstrom of speculation then boiling in
Europe. He moved in the society of the intellectuals, inquired into the