Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
transforming _The Vision of Columbus_ into an epic glorifying the great
republican experiment. His purpose is set forth in the preface.
[The] real object of the poem is to inculcate the love of national
liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence
and war; to show that on the basis of republican principle all good
morals, as well as good government and hopes of permanent peace,
must be founded; and to convince the student in political science,
that the theoretical question of the future advancement of human
society, till states as well as individuals arrive at universal
civilization, is held in dispute and still unsettled only because
we have had too little experience of organized liberty in the
government of nations, to have well considered its effects.
The humanitarian note is strong. War, slavery, monarchy, injustice,
the tyranny resulting from political inequality, and a host of other
evils, social and political, are assailed in vigorous declamation. It
may not be good poetry but the sentiments are those of an enlightened
and generous man. The conclusion rises to a vision of a golden age of
international commerce and universal peace, when “earth, garden’d all,
a tenfold burden brings,” and the sundered nations shall draw together,
and--
... cloth’d majestic in the robes of state,
Moved by one voice, in general congress meet
The legates of all empires.
In that future time science will have learned “with her own glance to
ken the total God,” and philosophy will “expand the selfish to the
social flame.” Of the political ideas incorporated in the massive work
some suggestion may be got from the following lines:
Ah, would you not be slaves, with lords and kings,
Then be not Masters; there the danger springs.
The whole crude system that torments this earth,
Of rank, privation, privilege of birth,
False honor, fraud, corruption, civil jars,
The rage of conquest and the curse of wars,
Pandora’s total shower, all ills combined
That erst o’erwhelmed and still distress mankind,
Boxt up secure in your deliberate hand,
Wait your behest to fix or fly this land.
Equality of right is nature’s plan;
And following nature is the march of man.
Whene’er he deviates in the least degree,
When, free himself, he would be more than free,
The baseless column, rear’d to bear his trust,
Falls as he mounts and whelms him in the dust....
Too much of Europe, here transplanted o’er,
Nursed feudal feelings on your tented shore,
Brought sable sires from Afric, call’d it gain,
And urged your sires to forge the fatal chain....
Restore their souls to men, give earth repose,
And save your sons from slavery, wars and woes.
Based on its rock of right your empire lies,
On walls of wisdom let the fabric rise;
Preserve your principles, their force unfold,
Let nations prove them and let kings behold.
+Equality+, your first firm-grounded stand;
Then +FREE ELECTION+; then your +FEDERAL BAND+:
This holy Triad should forever shine
The great compendium of all rights divine,
Creed of all schools, whence youths by millions draw
Their themes of right, their decalogues of law;
Till men shall wonder (in these codes inured)
How wars were made, how tyrants were endured.[392]
Diverse politics incline to diverse literary judgments, and the
critics are not yet done with Joel Barlow. If he was not a great poet
or a great political thinker, he was at least capable, open-minded,
generous, with a sensitive social conscience--certainly the most
stimulating and original of the literary group that foregathered
in Hartford. Injustice has long been done him by overlooking his
picturesque career, and his services to America, and restricting his
introduction to posterity to a few lines from _Hasty Pudding_. To
make a mush of so honest a thinker, to ignore his very considerable
contributions to the cause of democracy, is to impose too heavy a
penalty for his defection from Connecticut respectability. He suffered
quite enough in his lifetime. In the thick of his revolutionary
struggles abroad his wife begged him “to go home and be respectable”;
but it was not in the ardent nature of Joel Barlow to listen to such
counsel of timidity. He was in too deep to go back, and so while
Timothy Dwight was gathering laurels from every bush in Connecticut,
this apostle of humanitarianism, this apostate from Calvinistic
Federalism, was content to remain a byword and a shaking of the head
in the villages of his native commonwealth. For all which, perhaps,
the Washington salon and the intimate association with Jefferson may
have served as recompense. Better society could not be found even in
Hartford.
3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge • Free-Lance Democrat
In taking leave of this disturbant time when new social theories were
bringing confusion to weak understandings, one cannot do better than
to dip into the wittiest and most readable sketch produced by that
vigorous generation, as well as one of the sanest. _Modern Chivalry_
was the single noteworthy contribution to American letters by Hugh
Henry Brackenridge, a western Pennsylvanian of Scotch birth, and a
graduate of Princeton in the class with Freneau and Madison. With the
former he had practised his couplets, collaborating in writing the
commencement poem, _The Rising Glory of America_. After leaving college
he tried his hand at the usual things open to young graduates, was
tutor in the college, taught in an academy, studied divinity, served
as chaplain in the Revolutionary army, and later read law. He removed
eventually to the frontier town of Pittsburgh, was active in Republican
politics, became an ardent pro-French sympathizer, and finally went
upon the supreme bench of Pennsylvania. He wrote for his own amusement
and tried his hand at various kinds of polite literature, producing
a masque, a poetic drama on Bunker Hill, prose essays, some sermons,
and turned at last to satire. For this he was admirably equipped;
he possessed a keen, well-balanced mind, a prose style delightfully
colloquial and a wit pleasantly caustic.
Brackenridge is a refreshing person to come upon after one is satiated
with the heroic. A free-lance critic, independent in thought and act,
he was no vociferous party or class advocate given to enlisting God on
his side. Federalist and Republican alike might lose their heads and
indulge in unseemly clamor, but Brackenridge with good Scotch judgment
refused to howl with the pack. A stout and unrepentant democrat, he was
no visionary to shut his eyes to unpleasant facts lest they disturb
his faith. As he considered the turbulent confusions of an America
in rough process of democratization, he saw the evils as clearly as
the hope, and it amused him to satirize those evils after the manner
of Don Quixote. _Modern Chivalry_ has proved somewhat of a puzzle to
later critics who have not cleared their minds of the old cobwebs of
Federalist criticism. Thus a literary historian has suggested that it
is “a half-hidden satire on democracy”[393] and he inclines to number
it among the literary ram’s horns that were blown against the walls of
the democratic Jericho. But such an interpretation certainly misses
the point. Brackenridge had become a thorough Westerner with a fresh
point of view. Among the stump fields of his Pennsylvania circuit he
was equally removed from the cynicism of Hamilton and the romanticism
of Barlow. He saw all about him a rough and tumble democracy, living a
vigorous and capable if not lovely life. As a democrat he accepted the
fact of political equality and approved of it; the thing was there and
needed no justification or defense. Some of its ways were foolish, many
of its purposes were shortsighted; it amused him therefore to sharpen
his pen against certain of its absurdities and essay the remedial
effects of unembittered laughter. He was a realist concerned with
realities.
_Modern Chivalry_ is our first backcountry book. It is redolent
of stump-lands and their rude leveling ways, and for years it was
immensely popular along the western frontier. It is a satire aimed
primarily at backwoods shortcomings, but with an eye that kept turning
towards the older settlements to scrutinize their equal shortcomings.
Its main theme is concerned with certain weaknesses of popular
sovereignty already unpleasantly evident as a result of the extension
of suffrage; and in particular with the unseemly office-hunting zeal
of coonskin candidates. The preposterous spectacle of a pushing fellow
with no qualifications setting himself up for high office was to become
more frequent with the later rise of Jacksonian democracy; but already
there was abundant justification for the satire of Brackenridge. The
records of the time are loud in criticism of the demagoguery that
resulted from the sudden shift of leadership in consequence of the
social upheaval following the Revolutionary War. The old leaders of the
aristocratic tradition had fled or had fallen into disfavor, and new
men, too often of small capacity and less breeding, had pushed into
the seats of authority. With the triumph of Jefferson this transfer
of power went forward briskly to the scandal of all aristocrats. The
lust of office spread like the plague, and demagogues caught the
popular ear, none too nice to distinguish between sense and fustian.
Irving brushed against the democratic weakness in his brief venture
into politics, and vented his spleen in _Rip Van Winkle_. It is this
which Brackenridge deals with primarily in _Modern Chivalry_, the
first part of which was published in 1792 and the second in 1805. The
general leveling of offices, he pointed out, was not democracy, but the
abuse and ruin of democracy. America was engaged in a great and noble
experiment; the success of that experiment depended upon an honest and
intelligent electorate; it must not be brought to failure by demagogues
through the incapacity of the voter.
Brackenridge had come in later years to be a pacifist. He had had his
fill of revolutions and armed revolts. As a principal arbitrator during
the tumult of the Whisky Insurrection, he had come to fear popular
lawlessness; and as a friend of the French Revolution he was concerned
at the methods of the Jacobin leaders. Commenting on the Whisky
Insurrection he said in later years:
I saw before me anarchy, a shock to the government, a revolution
impregnated with the Jacobin principles of France.... Let no man
suppose I coveted a revolution; I had seen the evils of one already
in the American; and I had read the evils of another, the French.
My imagination presented the evils of the last strongly to my view,
and brought them so close to a possible experience at home, that
during the whole period of the insurrection, I could scarcely bear
to cast my eye on a paragraph of French news.[394]
A reasonable and intelligent democracy, holding steadily to the
purpose of the common good, was his cherished ideal. He was not a
political philosopher interested in general principles. His purpose
was to satirize manners, not to speculate on causes; and in the days
of triumphant republicanism the most conspicuous target was offered by
the tousled head of the demagogue, “the courtier of democracy.” In the
preface to the 1846 edition, the editor thus summarizes the political
views of Brackenridge:
An enlightened democracy was looked upon by him as the true
nobility. He considered the true democrat as the true gentleman,
who _ought_ to feel a stain on his fair reputation, “as a wound.”
He maintained “that democracy is not in its nature coarse, and
vulgar, or destitute of high integrity and honor.” The aim and