Benjamin Franklin V

SOURCE: An introduction to The Prose of the Minor Connecticut Wits, Vol. I, by Theodore Dwight, edited by Benjamin Franklin V, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1974, pp. iii-xv.

[Franklin is an American educator, editor, and critic. Below, he comments on the breadth and variety of prose pieces composed by the major and minor Connecticut Wits.]

It is the custom for each new appreciator of the Connecticut Wits to acknowledge that group's important place in the history of American letters and then lament that their books, some of which were among the most ambitious of their day, rest neglected on library shelves with two centuries of accumulated dust as coverlets. In the middle years of this century the Wits have been ignored because of the dominance of the useful but limited new criticism, because of a widely held but generally unchallenged belief that little of literary merit was written in this country before 1800, and because, frankly, their works do not constitute great literature. In the past decade, however, there has been a revival of interest in the Wits…, and the reasons for it are not difficult to discern. The Wits did not approach the genius of their mentor Pope in poetry and they did not possess the skills of Addison or Steele in their prose, but they were able and energetic literary craftsmen who fashioned the events of their day into productions that were on occasion very well received (e.g., M'Fingal), who defended America against foreign writers who branded it neither fit subject for nor adequate inspirer of artistic expression (e.g., Greenfield Hilo), and who were not reluctant to attempt an occasional epic (e.g., The Conquest of Candan). Their ambitions, accomplishments, and the esteem in which they were held helped make them, quite simply, the most formidable American authors in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

… Membership in the group was unofficial, but the nine men whose names are most often associated with it fall conveniently into a Major and a Minor group, with the division being made in large part on the quantity and quality of literary output and the ages of the individuals. Joel Barlow (1754-1812), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), David Humphreys (1752-1818), and John Trumbull (1750-1831) constitute the Majors, and Richard Alsop (1761-1815), Mason Fitch Cogswell (1761-1830), Theodore Dwight (1764-1846), Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801), and Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798) comprise the Minors. The Majors, with the exception of Humphreys, may be read today with some degree of pleasure, but so may the Minors, even though as a group they are considerably less heralded than the Majors.…

The light in which most of the Minor Wits' prose must be read is that of the politics of their day, and in their prose one may trace the decline of the Federalism that they embraced with such vigor. Especially instructive are Theodore Dwight's heretofore neglected pamphlets that were written between 1792 and 1810, years during which the Federalists lost their popular support and became, in large part, a party of memory.

Dwight's address to the Society of the Cincinnati in Hartford on 4 July 1792 reflects the thoughts of a man whose beliefs had been borne out by recent history. At that time the Constitution was five years old, the Bill of Rights and the Bank of the United States were but one, Washington was still in his first term in office, and the future looked bright for America. So in 1792, and especially on the anniversary of America's independence, Dwight could speak of the antebellum England as the "most haughty nation on earth" and could not only applaud without reservation America's revolution but could, in full confidence, call for the freedom of all oppressed people, be they French, Swedish, Russian, German, Negro, or female. After quoting from the book of Isaiah, Dwight concludes his address with these words: "The perdition in scripture of a season of universal freedom, and tranquility, is rapidly fulfilling; a spirit of toleration pervades all nations; and the religion of EMANUAL is extending its influence over the the [sic] regions of bigotry, persecution, and idolatry."

Two years later Dwight delivered an oration in which he continued to call for the freedom of all people, but his specific interest this time was the Negroes in Connecticut and the country at large who were being denied their basic human rights. (It is a mistake to consider the politically conservative Federalists backward in all matters. Both Dwight and Smith wrote eloquently for the manumission of slaves, and Smith was apparently a supporter of women's rights.) Dwight here announces that he is more concerned with justice for Negroes than he is with peace for Americans, and he writes convincingly that the only strong argument for the retention of slavery is interest, and "when it shall cease to be for the interest of mankind, to torture their fellow creatures in this wicked commerce, not one solitary individual will be found trafficking in human flesh." Dwight holds as an example to American slave owners the French Revolution and the revolt of the slaves against the government in St. Domingo in August 1791. He goes on to damn for the first time the excesses of the French Revolution, but his larger concern remains that all oppressed people should and shall be free.

His compassion is nowhere present in the oration of 4 July 1798. Gone is his advocacy of universal brotherhood, gone is his belief that America is a united country, and gone is his willingness to accept political idiosyncrasies. Dwight, a rabid Federalist, is here concerned with foreign and domestic influences that he thought threatened America's still fledgling government, and he calls on all citizens to be influenced neither by the example of the French government nor by its apostle in this country, Thomas Jefferson. Dwight breaks from the usual practice of eulogizing liberty on the fourth of July as he announces his topic: "THAT THE UNITED STATES ARE IN DANGER OF BEING ROBBED OF THEIR INDEPENDENCE, BY THE FRAUD AND VIOLENCE OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC" and "that there has been for many years, a steady effort on the part of France, to destroy the Independence of this country." He disposes of the argument that we are still indebted to the French for their assistance during our war with England, and then takes the offensive throughout the rest of his address by reconstructing the case against Citizen Genet and the French ambassadors who followed him. It is understandable to Dwight why Americans would sympathize with the new French government; after all, we are a people who love liberty and naturally side with revolution against tyranny. Yet, grievous excesses did occur after the revolution in France, and Dwight proposes several ways to keep similar excesses from visiting our shores: by being aware of individuals such as Jefferson "who wish to barter our freedom"; by keeping foreigners, and especially the Irish, out of elective office; and by a general resolve amongst our citizenry "to defend our Constitution, and Country, against every foreign encroachment; and especially against the encroachment of France."

The worst fears of Dwight and the Federalists came true when Jefferson became President in 1801, and it was in part in response to that election (and to the greater issue of a growing constituency for the Republicans) that Dwight delivered his oration on 7 July of that year, again ostensibly to celebrate the anniversary of America's independence, but in fact to place all evil on the Republicans and to claim virtue and godliness as the private possessions of the Federalists. He warns that the Jacobins (as the Federalists repeatedly called Jefferson's party's members) will not only destroy the national and state governments, but they will also bring about irreligion, immorality, and chaos. In all of this Dwight embraces religion, family, and general morality and thinks "how glorious it will be for Connecticut to stand firmly amidst the convulsions, and downfall of the nations of the world." He is obviously on the defensive, but even though his ad hominem arguments seem ludicrous after two centuries, they were strongly felt by him and his party after the government of Washington and Adams fell into the hands of the hated Jefferson.

Dwight's Remarks on the Documents Accompanying the Late Message of President Madison was first published in three consecutive numbers of his own Connecticut Courant (18 and 25 December 1809; 1 January 1810) in response to the documents published after Madison's message of 27 November in which he announced that he was dismissing the British Minister Francis James Jackson because he had insulted the American government. The accompanying documents were the correspondence between Jackson and the American Secretary of State Robert Smith which were made public in December to show that, in Madison's words, "forgetting the respect due to all governments, [Jackson] did not refrain from imputations on this, which required that no further communications should be received from him." Dwight agrees that if our government had indeed been insulted by Jackson then Madison's seemingly precipitate action would therefore be justified, but what he attempts in this pamphlet is a close analysis of the Jackson-Smith correspondence to discern for himself whether or not Madison acted correctly. His bias is of course anti-Madison and pro-England so it is not surprising that he concludes that the President acted not only incorrectly but also foolishly since to dismiss the English Minister might well lead to war with England that would force America into the supportive yet dangerous arms of France. Such a dependence on France is what the Federalists believed the Republicans wanted, and "it i s … much to be feared, that the instructions of the master have not been lost on the pupil—that the precepts and example of Mr. Jefferson, while President, sunk too deeply into the mind of Mr. Madison, while Secretary of State."

As Federalism became less popular with the electorate and as the party's powers therefore waned after Jefferson's election in 1800, Dwight's publications became more lengthy and detailed in their attacks on the Republicans and their policies. His six short pieces grew from eighteen to forty-eight pages between 1792 and 1810, but his next three efforts, in 1816, 1833, and 1839, were more ambitious undertakings that demanded the hard covers of books to contain his thoughts. In all three works he relies heavily on logic, documents, and history to support his continued assault, but his obviously hostile attitude toward events and personalities well in the past undercut much of the force of his arguments.

The first of these, written as Federalism continued to flourish only in Connecticut, was An Answer to Certain Parts of a Work Published by Mathew Carey, Entitled "The Olive Branch," or "Faults on Both Sides," published anonymously by "A Federalist" in 1816. The Olive Branch appeared in 1814 and was a call for the reconciliation of factions after the War of 1812. In his answer to the seventh edition of Carey's book Dwight congratulates the author for condescending to admit that the Republicans had erred in the past, but he upbraids him sarcastically and unmercifully for stating what the Federalists had always known—that the Republicans had opposed Federalist programs and ideas (viz., Jay's Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, and a navy) not because they lacked merit but because they were endorsed by the Federalists. Dwight says that just to admit those errors after a number of years is insufficient, that the Republicans should be made to pay dearly for their spiteful behavior.

But while he faintly praises Carey for admitting Republican errors, he damns him for finding any fault with the Federalists. He defends his party against the charge that it caused the War of 1812 and then failed to support it, and he in turn places the full blame for that war directly on Madison. Dwight restates his 1810 argument on the Madison-Smith-Jackson matter and concludes that the war, finally, was fought over the problem of impressment. The book ends with a defense of the Hartford Convention and with a dismissal of Carey's book as worthless.

As executive officer, Dwight was the only nonmember present at the Hartford Convention in 1814-15, and in The History of the Hartford Convention (1833) he summarizes his position in the following manner: the executive officer "was the only disinterested witness of what was transacted by the convention. He was present throughout every sitting, witnessed every debate, heard every speech, was acquainted with every motion and every proposition, and carefully noted the result of every vote on every question. He, therefore, of necessity was, ever has been, and still is, the only person, except the members, who had the opportunity to know, from personal observation, every thing that occured. His testimony, therefore, must be admitted and received, unless he can be discredited, his testimony invalidated, or its force entirely destroyed." Dwight's purpose in writing this book was to defend the Convention against ignorant criticism, but his credentials hardly need have been presented since what he wrote is not an history of the Convention at all; rather, it is a lengthy and detailed attack on Jefferson, Madison, and the Republican's reasons for entering and continuing the War of 1812. He reiterates the arguments and observations he made in his earlier publications (the Republicans were pro-French and anti-British; Jefferson opposed funding, banks, Hamilton, and the Jay Treaty; the difficulty between Madison and Francis James Jackson; Jefferson's Mazzei Letter; and so on), rehashes the reasons for the war, and again concludes that the only legitimate reason for the war was the easily resolved problem of impressment. The Federalists were convinced that the war was permitted to continue after all issues had been resolved solely to humiliate Great Britain.

What passes for the history of the Hartford Convention in roughly the last fifth of the book is more a presentation of documents than an actual history. There were twenty-six delegates (including Harrison Gray Otis and Roger Sherman) from five New England states, and they considered revising the Constitution so it would permit the states to have more rights. (They did not, as is commonly asserted, propose seceding from the Union.) But however noble the aims of those men were, their efforts were entirely without effect because the conclusion of the war was announced shortly after they adjourned. With the end of the war sectionalism and party factionalism all but died in New England, even though there was a hard core of Federalists who would never forgive nor forget the chicanery of Jefferson, Madison, and their followers, as is illustrated by Dwight's History.

Dwight's final book was The Character of Thomas Jefferson, as Exhibited in His Own Writings (1839), a volume in which he attacks for the last time the man whose ideas he found consistently unacceptable since his 1798 pamphlet. But while he was aware that "the federalists, as a political party, have long ceased to act, or even exist," and that the election of 1800 signalled their demise, his purpose in writing this book was to show to a younger generation of Americans the principles on which the Republic was founded and how Jefferson himself deviated from them. In order to do this, he quotes extensively from Jefferson's own published correspondence so that the portrait that emerges of our third President "is drawn by himself, and therefore must be a likeness." One may of course question the verisimilitude of Jefferson's portrait, but the most striking picture in the book is the one of the author himself.

It is clear from reading his published prose that Dwight was a citizen who dutifully concerned himself with the issues facing his state and nation and had the ability to put his impressions of those issues in writing and into print. But while his earliest publications extol the virtues of all men, with the excesses of the French Revolution and then the election of Jefferson he became dedicated to a defense of Federalism and of the old ways. As the eighteenth century grew into the nineteenth and as it in turn progressed, as the country expanded westward and as the population began to swell (from about 4 million in 1790 to more than 17 million in 1840), Dwight was not able to enlarge his own political and social vision and grow apace. Instead, if anything his vision narrowed until it became fixed finally not on what he took to be the foibles of the early Republicans, but specifically on the one man he saw as responsible for the ruin of the pure American government that was best embodied in Washington. By 1839 Jefferson had been out of office for thirty years and dead for thirteen; Madison and Monroe had each served two terms, John Quincy Adams one, Jackson two, and Van Buren was in the midst of his one term; American literature, which had offered little of unqualified merit at the time of Dwight's 1792 pamphlet, had by 1839 produced the complete works of Charles Brockden Brown, most of the major productions of Irving and Cooper, Bryant's best poems, substantial work by Poe, Hawthorne, Simms, Emerson, and Longfellow, and the rough humor of the old Southwest was being read in the Spirit of the Times; literary romanticism was being established in this country, and transcendentalism had begun to flourish practically next door to Dwight—during the years between his first and last published efforts, then, Dwight became a grouch, a sore loser who was unable to forget and move past a defeat incurred as the new century began. His book on Jefferson is a sad portrait of an anachronistic figure trying for the last time to recapture the past by vilifying the memory of his detested political foe.

Richard Alsop, who was, in verse, the most politically assertive of the Minor Wits, wrote but one political tract in prose, and it was inspired by a pamphlet war during the 1803 campaign to elect twenty nominees to the Connecticut State Legislature. In that year the Federalists were of course struggling to maintain what favor they held with the electorate, and, in hopes of assuring the election of their own men to the General Assembly on 19 September, they published an essay entitled "An Address to the Freemen of Connecticut" in the Connecticut Courant on 8 June. In that piece they pointed out that Connecticut government under the Federalists had been good for all people in the past, so there was no need to change to a government of "visionary theories, or the mad projects of designing men …," especially when the Republican national government was attempting "to subvert the system of our State government.…" The piece concludes with a list of the names of twenty Federalists to be supported.

They evidently issued their appeal too early, however, because the Republicans had time to publish a rebuttal in the form of a pamphlet, Republican Address to the Free Men of Connecticut, dated 30 August 1803. Here the General Committee of the Republicans attacks the Federalists for their blind acceptance of the status quo, for their dedication to a master/slave society, and for their monarchical leanings, and it concludes that a state government under the Federalists would set Connecticut "in hostile array" against the national government. Therefore, the freemen of Connecticut should vote for the twenty Republicans whose names appear at the end of their pamphlet. This tract apparently was persuasive because the Federalists felt the need to reprint their essay in the Connecticut Courant for 7 September, twelve days before the election, and to publish it as a pamphlet.

The Federalists issued two other pamphlets which attacked the Republican piece and defended the integrity of their own, and one of them was Alsop's To the Freemen of the State of Connecticut. What Alsop wrote, then, was a Federalist response to the Republican response to the Federalists, and in it he questions the candor of the Republicans, defends his own party against the charge of monarchism, and concludes that God will protect the Federalists "against the rude shocks of democratic violence …" He is defensive throughout and evinces none of the biting satire that is found in his poetic contributions to the individual numbers of The Echo that first appeared in the 1790s. There is a sense of doom in this pamphlet, an underlying acknowledgment that the freemen of Connecticut were at that moment slipping even further than before out of the political camp of the Federalists. That the Federalists won that particular election was only a short-lived comfort for them as the Republicans thereafter did continue to gain more support from the electorate, but as his party dwindled Alsop did not attempt to resurrect it and live in the past.

But, when he chose in 1808 to translate Etienne Gosse's The Lovers of La Vendee, or Revolutionary Tyranny, which was originally published in four volumes in France in 1799, he was making available for the first and only time to American readers this novel about the horrors of the civil war that was fought in the maritime department of Vendee, France, between the peasants of that area and the republicans. The melodramatic story of Emily Dorman, her father, and her seemingly immortal lover Darcourt is engaging enough, but Alsop was taken with the novel not because of its art but because "it exhibits but too true a picture of the state of La Vendee and the sufferings of the unfortunate inhabitants, during the civil war provoked by the cruelties of the Revolutionary Government." He thought his effort would be well rewarded if it would "impress on one of his countrymen a deeper conviction of [civil war's] baleful effects.…" So while less consistent and less vociferous than Dwight in his damnation of the excesses of the French Revolution, Alsop was nonetheless fretful, as Jefferson's second term was about to end, that the American Jacobins might cause in this country a destruction such as that their French counterparts caused in La Vendee.

The most popular piece of prose by any of the Minor Wits was Alsop's A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings, of John R. Jewitt (1815), a book that has gone through about twenty editions and which is not included in this volume because it has been published in facsimile elsewhere. (Also not included is Alsop's translation of Abbe Don J. Ignatius Molina's The Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili, 1808.) Jewitt was an Englishman who was, in 1802 at age nineteen, the armorer on the Boston that was bound for the American northwest. When the ship stopped at Nootka Sound in Vancouver, twenty-five of the twenty-seven men on board, including the captain, John Salter, were decapitated by the natives who were led by their chief Maquina. Jewitt and the sailmaker John Thompson were able to avoid the mob's wrath, and they lived with the Indians for twenty-eight months, from March 1803 to July 1805. Jewitt and Thompson were rescued by Capt. Samuel Hill and the Lydia as it was sailing for the Orient, and they finally arrived in Boston in 1807, the year Jewitt published his diary as A Journal, Kept at Nootka Sound.…

In 1813 Jewitt and his wife of four years moved to Middletown, Connecticut, where he became friendly with Alsop to whom he recounted his exploits. Alsop took the original Journal, embellished it with the details Jewitt added orally, and had this enlarged edition published as the Narrative in 1815, the year of his own death. Jewitt's Journal, as published in 1807, contains forty-eight pages of entries such as this one: "March 1. (Wednesday.) Clear weather. Saw twelve whales out in the offing." Alsop's edition of over two hundred pages clothes the skeletal nature of the original, but it does more than just elaborate on the specific events that are detailed there. The earlier document begins with Jewitt's arrival and ends abruptly with his departure from Nootka Sound, but the 1815 account begins with the young Jewitt in England where the captain and certain crewmen of the Boston visit his father, and when the reader soon sees the heads of Capt. Salter and William Ingraham among those aligned on the Boston's deck, there is a feeling of loss that is not gained from a reading of the 1807 edition. The most striking difference between the two, however, is the amount of space Alsop gives to the customs and habits of Maquina's people. We learn that they were poor hunters but excellent fishermen, that their music was soft and harmonic and was often accompanied by a drum, that they had difficulty felling the trees that would become their canoes, and that the other tribes in the area were actual and not merely abstractions.

The great temptation with this book is to compare it to the early works of Herman Melville, and especially to his first novel, Typee. In each of the works the narrator suffers an injury that does not heal immediately, has as a companion a crewman from his ship, is held in benign slavery by the natives, and is both pleased and saddened to leave the people who cared for him throughout his captivity. But while these parallels do in fact exist they are only superficial, and Alsop's tale of Jewitt's sufferings offers considerably less artistry than does Melville's story of Tommo.…

Alsop published little prose, but that that he did reveals a man who expressed his political views more obliquely and subtly than Dwight, who understood the craft of fiction although he created none himself, and who was competent with languages, as his translations from the Spanish and French attest.…

Elihu Hubbard Smith was the last of all the Wits to be born and the first to die, but in his short life he became a doctor (he died from the yellow fever that he was helping others overcome), published several letters to Dr. William Buel on the 1795 fever epidemic in New York, and helped edit The Medical Repository (1797-98). He also wrote poems, an opera (Edwin and Angelina) in 1797, and edited his best known work, American Poems, Selected and Original (1793), the first anthology of American poetry. Smith wrote little prose, but what he did write is significant and reveals his quality of mind.

His 1798 Discourse on the manumission of slaves is a brief recounting of the history of slavery and a statement on the basic dignity of all men. After asserting that "the history of man is the history of slavery," he goes on to trace that history to the time of the wrathful John Woolman and the more subdued Anthony Benezet, Quakers who sounded the call in this country for the freedom of all slaves. Smith's target is the slave owners who tried to defend themselves on the grounds of justice (they owned slaves and were therefore entitled to them), on the grounds of humanity (they improved the plight of the unfortunate Africans), on the grounds of policy (other nations do not frown upon slavery), on the grounds that "it is for individual interest, and thus for national benefit, that slavery be permitted," and finally on the grounds that even if slavery is undesirable they can do nothing to correct it because the institution began with their fathers' fathers, and to do away with it would be to destroy the social fabric. Smith finds all of these arguments fallacious and inhumane and concludes that if Negroes are on occasion less than totally satisfactory as human beings, it is not their fault since any people would be corrupted if they were constantly exposed to debauchery, drunkenness, and other such behavior as exhibited by their masters. Despite their ill treatment, however, the Negroes "exhibit many examples of humble, but of cheering virtue." Such a statement today sounds dated, but his Discourse is evidence that Smith was a man who was genuinely concerned about the plight of slaves and was a man who could and did speak eloquently in their behalf. (His humanitarian leanings are also evident in his willingness to write an advertisement for Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin, A Dialogue that was published anonymously in New York in 1798. Alcuin is an early radical argument for women's rights, and Smith evidently shared that attitude with his friend Brown. He also wrote, with Samuel L. Mitchill and Edward Miller, Address, &c [1796] in which the three doctors argue against the absurd medical practices of the past and announce that their Medical Repository will be an attempt to produce facts which "are the only rational basis of theory.")

Perhaps the most interesting of all of Smith's publications is the series of six short pieces he wrote for The Monthly Magazine in London in 1798, half of which were published after his death in September of that year. Here he gives biographical and critical sketches of five of the Wits—Timothy Dwight (July, pp. 1-3), John Trumbull (August, pp. 81-82), David Humphreys (September, pp. 167-68), Joel Barlow (October, pp. 250-51), and Lemuel Hopkins (November, pp. 343-44)—in addition to a defense of the collaborative Anarchiad in which he permits excerpts from that satiric poem to speak for themselves (December, pp. 418-19).

Smith wrote these pieces because he had noticed a factual error in an advertisement for one of Timothy Dwight's books in The Monthly Magazine and because he therefore wanted to offer an accurate account of "the progress of the fine arts" in America. Marcia Bailey, in A Lesser Hartford Wit, Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith, makes the case that Smith was, with these sketches, among the first to offer biographical information about the most important men of letters in this country at that time, that he was among the first Americans to defend the talents of American artists in British publications, and that he, the first anthologist of American poetry, was America's "first literary spokesman abroad." While such claims may in fact be accurate, they suffer from too great an effort to make Smith's contributions more significant than they are. Much more to his credit is the quality of these sketches that were written at a time when Americans tended to apotheosize most things indigenous to their country. Smith knew these five men intimately, so one would expect him to laud their literary productions without reservation, especially when writing to a foreign audience. Instead of doing that he offers a balanced and intelligent criticism of their work that is as accurate today as it was then. Timothy Dwight was his mentor and was one of the most formidable men of his time, yet Smith laments that his elder's poetic powers have produced works which no longer appeal to the modern reader and therefore will not "promote the welfare of mankind, in any remarkable degree." Similarly, he finds Humphreys an ordinary poet who possesses no great originality or enthusiasm, asserts that Hopkins is "more remarkable for invention than for execution," and avers that Barlow's Vision of Columbus lacks "bold and original flights of genius" and that "some of its most interesting passages are close copies of correspondent descriptions in the Incas of Marmontel." All is far from negative in these comments as Smith is arguing for the validity of America's literature, but this kind of integrity from a friend of those he is recommending is refreshing.

While these pieces were first published in England, they were noticed in this country as well. Joseph Dennie, who was a friend of Smith's and who was to gain fame as editor of The Port Folio in Philadelphia, was editor of the Farmers' Museum, or Lay Preacher's Gazette in Walpole, New Hampshire, a newspaper in which he published the five biographical sketches in the numbers of 1, 15, and 29 April; 2 and 23 September 1799. To several of them Dennie added his own comments in which he condemns America for forcing Smith to send his productions to foreign publications and for offering in our own press "meargre memories of a bloated 'General,' the adventures of a cattle convict, and the 'experiences and awakenings' of a baptist preacher" to inquisitive foreigners as examples of illustrious Americans. (Dennie thought so highly of the sketches that he reissued them in The Spirit of the Farmers' Museum, and Lay Preacher's Gazette, an anthology he edited in 1801.) Dennie's railing at his countrymen and journalists did not go unheeded as The Monthly Magazine and American Review, edited in New York by C. B. Brown, printed the five sketches in May, August, and September-December 1799, and June 1800. Within three years, then, these short yet significant pieces were published four times and therefore rank behind Alsop's story of Jewitt as the most popular prose pieces by the Minor Wits.

Smith was the most liberal, least political, and least doctrinaire of the Minor Wits, and, even though he died before he was thirty, he is the most interesting of the group. Hitherto unavailable but valuable Smith material has recently appeared in James E. Cronin's edition of The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798) (1973).

The Minor Wits were neither extremely talented nor popular writers of prose, and to see them at their artistic best one must examine their poems. But their prose, and especially that of Dwight, offers the view of bright men as they responded to the deterioration of their revered Federalist party. It is nonetheless too simple to brand them as only political conservatives who became anachronistic as a new century began: they were men who cared deeply for their country, who had a belief in the basic dignity and worth of all men, who were generally humane, and who were men of varied if modest literary talents.…

Benjamin Franklin V

SOURCE: An introduction to The Poetry of the Minor Connecticut Wits, edited by Benjamin Franklin V, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970, pp. xi-xxii.

[In the following excerpt from a 1967 introduction, Franklin presents a brief overview of the poetry of the lesser-known Connecticut Wits.]

John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, and Joel Barlow dominated the American literary scene in the last two decades of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century. These poets, all born between 1750 and 1754 and all graduates of Yale College, wrote poetry that for the most part praised the history and the society of our new nation. All but Barlow were politically, socially, and religiously conservative and were the first Americans to speak out against the freethinking and, as they saw them, ignorant masses. Contemporary to and closely associated with these poets was another literary coterie that included Richard Alsop (1761-1815), Mason Fitch Cogswell (1761-1830), Theodore Dwight (1764-1846), Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801), and Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798). These nine men have been known collectively as the Connecticut, or Hartford, Wits, but in 1907 Annie Russell Marble correctly divided them into a "major" (the former) and a "minor" (the latter) group (Heralds of American Literature, 1907). With the exception of the Deist Smith, the Minor Wits held the same cultural beliefs as the major group, the average age of the Minors was ten years younger than the Majors, and Cogswell (in 1780) and Smith (in 1786) earned degrees at Yale while Alsop, Theodore Dwight (both in 1798), and Hopkins (in 1784) were awarded honorary degrees there. The most noticeable distinction between the two groups is the amount of poetry they produced. The Major Wits were prolific to the extent of tedium, while, the Minor Wits do not equal in quantity the collected poems of a Barlow or a Timothy Dwight.

At the time the English literati were aware of the newnesses of the Lyrical Ballads, the Minor Wits, as did all Federalist poets, emulated the poetics of the English neoclassicists in general and of Pope in particular. The logical patterns of parallel and contrast, the metaphoric meanings, puns, diction, and heroic couplets—all derived from Pope and the Augustans—may be seen in the poetry of the Minor Wits. Gordon E. Bigelow has noticed that the American poets writing around 1800, not unlike the Augustans, "looked upon these 'ornaments,' as the 'enamel,' 'painting,' or 'colors' which a poet could apply, as it were, from the outside, which could be manipulated or revised according to rules which had no reference to the inner intent of the particular poem" (Rhetoric and American Poetry of the Early National Period, 1960). Although not every poem by the Minor Wits contains all of these devices, almost all of their poems include some of them.

The eighteen numbers of "The Echo" which were collected in The Echo; With Other Poems are the basis for whatever fame or notoriety the Minor Wits today possess. It is generally agreed that Alsop edited these parodies, burlesques, satires, and lampoons, but Cogswell, Dwight, Hopkins, and Smith either co-authored various numbers with Alsop or wrote some individually. The individual "Echoes" attack the elderly Samuel Adams, the philosophy of H. H. Brackenridge, speeches by John Hancock, the general behavior of the Jacobins or Democrats, the French Revolution, and the archenemy of the Federalists, Thomas Jefferson. The Federalist Echo, then, ridicules in heroic couplets the principles of the Democrats. Alsop and the other Minor Wits,

using every tactic of the smear and the big lie, … branded the republican Tammany sometimes as 'Jacobin,' a term equivalent to the modern 'Red' or 'Commie,' and hurled personal abuse at men of their own kind … whose espousal of republican principles made them traitors to their class. They stirred up class prejudice against 'high-flying mushrooms,'—against newly-made citizens of Irish birth in particular—and against native born 'people's friends' like John Hancock of Massachusetts, who not only fraternized with foreigners but treated 'Negroes to a royal dance' (Mary Dexter Bates, "Columbia's Bards: a Study of American Verse from 1783 through 1799," Unpub. diss., [Brown Univ., 1954]).

The spirit of The Echo is accurately captured in the plates by the miniature painter Elkanah Tisdale.… Tisdale, who allegedly wrote and illustrated the political satire entitled The Gerry Mander (Salem, 1812), was also responsible for the plates in Trumbull's M'Fingal. It appears that since Tisdale did the plates in both The Echo and M'Fingal, two of the most important volumes in our early National period, he possessed at least the spirit of the Wits. Scholarship into the ethos of Tisdale the man and the artist might well be a fruitful venture.

In another joint effort Alsop teamed with Dwight and Hopkins to write The Political Green-House, for the year 1798. This political satire was patterned after the new year's verses of the day; like The Echo, it denounces Jefferson, the Democrats, and the Jacobins. It vividly limns post-Revolutionary France as a wasteland, and it praises the state of Vermont for purging its government of Jacobins. This poem praises Benjamin Rush, but it lampoons the Major Wit Joel Barlow, the conservative turned Democrat.

The remainder of Alsop's poetry is non-political. His most ambitious effort was The Charms of Fancy, a work written in 1788 but not published until 1856. If this is Alsop's most ambitious poem, it is not his most successful. The notes are ponderous, the diction is stilted, and "in all its 2300 lines of heroic couplets [it] contains not a fresh image or an original idea" (William P. Trent, et al., ed., Cambridge History of American Literature, 1917).

Alsop's two best poems are two of his shortest. In "Verses to the Shearwater—On the Morning After a Storm at Sea" (or "Ode to the Sheer Water"), the poet effectively captures the sailor's thoughts after an uneasy night, and he neatly juxtaposes the tumult of the waves and the civilization of the sailor with the simple existence of the bird. "Song from the Italian" may well not be a translation at all since there is nowhere a reference to a specific Italian verse. This carpe diem poem, while not possessing the urgency of Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress," is nonetheless a delightful attempt by the speaker to seduce, by means of logic, the "fair Iola." It may be true that "as a poet Alsop was often elegant, but his verse was generally without energy" (Rufus W. Griswold, The Poets and Poetry of America, 1842); still, these two short poems indicate that on occasion Alsop's "powers were certainly above the ordinary level of our native authors" (Samuel Kettell, Specimens of American Poetry, 1829).

Alsop, proficient in several languages, translated a number of poems into English, especially from the Italian. His longest translation is The Enchanted Lake of the Fairy Morgana, a translation of the second book of the comic Italian poet Francisco Berni's Orlando Inamorato. Alsop is here "unhampered by that self-consciousness and stiffness of expression which are the most common faults of the inexperienced translator" (William B. Otis, American Verse 1625-1807, 1909), and the poem is enhanced by the poet's own corrections and notes.

Elihu Hubbard Smith, editor of American Poems, Selected and Original, the first anthology of American poetry, produced little poetry himself. Smith's version of Goldsmith's ballad "Edwin and Angelina," the opera 'Edwin and Angelina, or the Banditti, an Opera in Three Acts, contains the abundance of romanticism that was characteristic of the late eighteenth century. It was performed only once on the New York stage. This first American drama of outlaws probably influenced Dunlap to write the second outlaw drama, The Man of Fortitude (Marcia E. Bailey, A Lesser Hartford Wit, Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith 1771-1798, 1928).

In "Occasional Address" Smith apotheosizes the theater. He traces the history of the theater from the mystery plays to the English actor Barton Booth (d. 1733), and he believes that a play should delight,

But greater still, and far more nice the art,
To fix the impressive moral in the heart.

Smith also begs his audience to be patient and not to chide actors or dramatists who do not compare favorably with Shakespeare, Dryden, or Colley Cibber. Although it contains an abundance of names and allusions and although it is at best a minor occasional piece, this poem appears to be ideally suited for the theater audience to which it was presented by the actor John Hodgkinson.

Smith also wrote twenty-one of the thirty-five poems in the Ella-Birtha-Henry correspondence. Smith, who signed his name "Ella" in a 1791 letter to Cogswell, was "Ella," Joseph Bringhurst, Jr., was probably "Birtha," and Mason Fitch Cogswell was "Henry." These poems were published in the Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia) from February to August, 1791.

During the eighteenth century the sonnet became an ignored poetic form. Five of Smith's sonnets were written in 1788 and are characterized by the "overstrained sensibility of his period, by the usual colorless personifications, and by an amount of inversion and ineptness in adjusting his structure and rhymes to the Italian sonnet scheme which are in striking contrast to his later fluency, and are doubtless due to the immaturity of the writer" (Bailey). Smith's mature poetry, while infested with unimaginative diction, possesses a sincerity, especially in "Ode Written on Leaving the Place of My Nativity," that makes his poetry more readable than that of many of his contemporaries.

There has been little written about the poet Theodore Dwight, the younger brother of Timothy. It is known that, next to Alsop, Dwight wrote most of The Echo, that his effort in The Political Green-House was equal to that of Alsop and Hopkins, and that he wrote the "Triumph of Democracy, A Poem" and "Sketches of the Times, For the Year 1807" which are included in The Echo volume. However, only a few other of his poems are extant. Jared P. Kirtland's notes to "Jefferson and Liberty" … attribute "Moll Carey" to Dwight. Dwight wrote "Moll Carey" to satirize the Democrats' singing of "Jefferson and Liberty" in which they commemorated Jefferson's election to the Presidency. Dwight is biting, sarcastic, and unfair throughout the poem, and his are the most caustic comments made toward the Democrats by the Minor Wits.

In "Lines Addressed to a Mother" Dwight sensitively captures a mother's feelings for her child, and in "Lines on the Death of Washington" he skillfully avoids the temptation to which Alsop succumbed in his poem on the same subject. Alsop was unable to limit his poem; it is weakened by the long and superfluous summary of a life that was well known to all Americans. Dwight's eulogy is straightforward and concise, and it is only when he ranks the dead hero above all the ancient sages and refers to our "widow'd country" that his emotion becomes overly patronizing.…

Lemuel Hopkins composed "Echo XVIII"—which was published separately as The Democratiad,—and The Guillotina, both of which comment on repercussions from the Jay Treaty. He also was co-author of The Political Green-House and was, with Humphreys, Trumbull, and Barlow, one of the authors of The Anarchiad.…

Hopkins is perhaps best known for his three shortest poems. When he wrote "Epitaph on a Patient killed by a Cancer Quack" in 1785, the medical profession was in its infancy and was in danger of becoming overwhelmed by folk remedies and superstition. In medicine there were many able and outstanding doctors, but there was also an abundance of quacks (Richard H. Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 1600-1860, 1962). It was those quacks that the poet-physician Hopkins satirizes in his masterfully crafted poem. Leon Howard has noticed that in this poem Hopkins "announced in almost every line, the appearance of a new writer whose rough, nervous wit was as stimulating in its matter-of-fact purpose as it was unpretentious of the 'higher' literary aims of more ambitious men" (The Connecticut Wits, 1943). Both "The Hypocrite's Hope" and "On General Ethan Allen" are similar harsh attacks on hypocrisy and Deism, or, as Hopkins saw it, atheism. Hopkins aided Barlow in versifying Dr. Watts's Psalms in 1785. Despite a considerable controversy over who versified the individual Psalms, it is generally agreed that Hopkins did Psalm LXXXVIII.

Hopkins had no literary ambitions, but his caustic writing makes him the most easily identifiable of the Minor Wits. He possessed a good power of description, a keen sense of satire, and an original and pungent humor. Stanley T. Williams has observed that "Hopkins' verses indicate the inclination among the Wits, not merely toward the grandiose aims of Humphreys, Barlow, and Dwight, but toward poetry as a kindly, witty instrument for daily incidents and human foibles" (The Literature of Connecticut, 1936). Hopkins did indeed comment on "daily incidents and foibles" in poetry that was far from kindly. This poet's lampoons are among the most vicious poems written by the Minor Wits.

Mason Fitch Cogswell is the most perplexing of the Minor Wits. His name is continuously mentioned as a member of the coterie; yet with the exception of a few unenumerated lines in the "Henrico Echo" ("Echo X") and the "Henry" poems, we possess none of his poetry. Kettell records that Cogswell was present at William Brown's office in Hartford with Alsop, Theodore Dwight, and "a few others" when the idea for The Echo was conceived (Specimens of American Poetry, II); Francis Parsons claims, without foundation, that Cogswell was "one of the chief contributors to 'The Echo'" (The Friendly Club, And Other Portraits, 1922); and Leon Howard, also without foundation, contends that Cogswell "was too modest about his literary ability to cooperate fully with the others, although he wrote copiously in secret" (The Connecticut Wits). Aside from a 1793 letter from Alsop to Cogswell which proves that Cogswell helped compose The Echo, conclusive evidence that Cogswell wrote poetry is found in a letter from Smith to Cogswell in March, 1791: "I have written to Theodore [Dwight] on the subject of a poetical correspondence and I hope you will be persuaded to cast in your contributions, even if it be like the poor widow's mite. I have begun and done something in the business and am prepared to carry it on somewhat further. To receive assurance of support from you will encourage me to act with the more vigour and attention. You have already many small pieces in your hands and it requires neither much time or much severity of application to produce others" (Quoted from Bailey). The "poetical correspondence" is the Ella-Birtha-Henry correspondence. This letter leaves no doubt that Cogswell was "Henry": he was aware of the correspondence, Smith asked him to enter into the correspondence which was already begun, and Henry did not contribute a poem until two months after the correspondence began in February, 1791.

Grace Cogswell Root, a descendent of Cogswell, grants that Trumbull, the two Dwights, Humphreys, Hopkins, Alsop, and Smith were "part of M.F.C.'s background, and occasionally of his foreground, in Hartford," but she doubts that the belief "that he was an official member of 'the Hartford Wits' has any corroborating testimony" (Father and Daughter, A Collection of Cogswell Family Letters and Diaries, 1772-1830, 1924). It must be recalled that membership in this coterie was not "official"; Cogswell's literary status, while still undefined, rests somewhere between the claims of Parsons and Root. Cogswell was probably not a major contributor to The Echo, and he was probably the least prolific of the Minor Wits. Nonetheless, there is no discussion of the Minor Wits that fails to include Cogswell as at least a confidant to the others of that group. Even if he was not an "official member" of the Minor Wits, Cogswell, like Tisdale, embodied the spirit of that group. …

Luther G. Riggs

SOURCE: A preface to The Anarchiad by David Humphries and others, edited by Luther G. Riggs, 1861. Reprint by Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967, pp. iv-viii.

[In the following excerpt from his preface to his 1861 edition of The Anarchiad, Riggs comments on its historical context and significance.]

In presenting The Anarchiad to the public, now for the first time in book form, the editor feels that he is in the performance of a duty—that he becomes, as it were, an instrument of justice—a justice delayed for more than half a century, to the genius and loyalty of its authors, who were among the noblest and most talented sons of the American Revolution.

Why a work possessing the merits of The Anarchiad has not, ere this, been called up from its oblivious sleep to take its appropriate place among the honored volumes in the homes of the people—by what strange oversight it has not before been brought to public view, and placed within the reach of all, we will not attempt to say.

In 1786, Hartford was the residence of a number of the most celebrated poets of the eighteenth century—among whom, were DAVID HUMPHREYS, JOEL BARLOW, JOHN TRUMBULL, and Dr. LEMUEL HOPKINS;—and the veins of satire which were given forth in many of their literary productions, gained for them the appellation of "the Hartford wits."…

The Anarchiad is universally conceded to have been written in concert by Humphreys, Barlow, Trumbull, and Hopkins; but what particular installment or numbers was written by either, has never been definitely ascertained. The fact that the papers were anonymously communicated to the publishers at New Haven, and that the authorship of any given portion of the work was never divulged by the members of this literary club, renders it almost impossible to fix upon any particular paper, or portion of a paper, and arrive at a certain knowledge in relation to its writer.

The Anarchiad is a mock-critical account of a pretended ancient epic poem, which a member of a society of critics and antiquarians had accidentally found among some recently discovered ruins, imbedded with "utensils more curious and elegant than those of Palmyra or Herculaneum," and whose preservation, through such a long lapse of years, and amid marks of hostility and devastation, was indeed little short of miraculous. The author assumes to have taken possession of this poem in the name and for the use of the society of which he was a component part. Being passionately fond of poetry, he immediately set about cleansing it from the extraneous concretions in which it was enveloped; and by means of a chemic preparation made use of in restoring oil paintings, he soon succeeded in rendering it tolerably legible. It was then that he ascertained the production to be styled The Anarchiad: A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night.

When this fabulous announcement was first made in the print of the Gazette, it was received with a remarkable degree of credulity by many readers. The plan was well conceived, and the details relating to it were narrated in a plausible manner; and, upon the whole, it was not half as absurd as the celebrated "moon hoax" perpetrated by the New York Sun newspaper, many years afterwards, and readily believed by multitudes in all parts of the country. Besides, public attention, but a few months previous to the announcement of the exhuming of The Anarchiad, had been somewhat aroused by the discovery of several ruined Indian fortifications, with their singular relies: the story of the early emigration of a band of Britons and Welch to this country, and of an existing tribe of their descendants, in the interior of the continent, had also quite recently been revived and circulated.

The Anarchiad is pre-eminently a NEW ENGLAND POEM. Its publication, at a time when New England was convulsed by the evils growing out of the war of our Revolution, and when insurrectionary mobs had arisen in various parts of the land, and fears were entertained of their proceedings being imitated in others—at such a time, this fearless satire, being scattered broadcast into the homes of the people, through the columns of the weekly press, is supposed to have exerted great and beneficial influence upon the public mind, and to have tended in no small degree to check the leaders of insubordination and infidel philosophy.

But when we say that it is a New England Poem, treating mainly of affairs in that part of the Union, as they existed at the time when it was written, we say, also, that it is no less a NATIONAL POEM, battling nobly for the right universal, for the majesty of law, and for the federal government. Many passages in it seem peculiarly adapted to the exigencies of the present time; and the wholesome sentiments which everywhere pervade its pages can hardly fail of being as heartily endorsed by every lover of his country, and every loyal citizen, as they will unquestionably be regarded with feelings of the most bitter execration by every traitorous and degenerate son of this brightest and fairest of lands. But these soul-inspiring sentiments are too numerous for us to particularize. The reader will find them in plenteous profusion as he reviews its pages.…

William C. Dowling

SOURCE: "Joel Barlow and The Anarchiad," Early American Literature, Vol. XXV, No. 1, 1990, pp. 18-33.

[Dowling considers the "puzzle" of Barlow's role in the making of The Anarchiad, concluding that his participation must have been the result of "a certain limited and privileged moment in which men employing separate mental worlds could suppose themselves to be making identical sense out of issues identically urgent to them and their fellow citizens."]

There are two puzzles associated with Joel Barlow's role in relation to The Anarchiad, the fragmentary mock-epic composed by a group of Hartford literati between October 1786 and September 1787 in hopes of influencing the momentous debate that would ultimately engender the United States Constitution. These may be called the compositional and the ideological, the first being simply the question of which numbers of The Anarchiad, or which parts of which numbers, were actually written by Barlow. It remains a puzzle because, although the external evidence for Barlow's participation is wholly persuasive—shortly after the appearance of the first number, David Humphreys wrote a letter to Washington naming himself, John Trumbull, and Barlow as collaborators in the project—most modern commentators have taken the matter of individual contributions to be something of a permanent mystery; "which portions were written by which authors," says Arthur L. Ford in a recent discussion of Barlow and The Anarchiad, "is impossible to determine" [Joel Barlow, 1971].

The ideological puzzle posed by Barlow's role in The Anarchiad, on the other hand, concerns that dramatic alteration in intellectual and political convictions sometimes spoken of as his "conversion"—from (on the usual account) the Calvinist orthodoxy of his Connecticut upbringing to the sort of skeptical Deism associated with Paine's Age of Reason, from the moderate or conservative republicanism of his friends Dwight and Humphreys to the more radical egalitarianism associated with the French Revolution, and from a cyclical theory of civilization inherited from Graeco-Roman historiography to the progressive theory of history unfolded in works like Condorcet's L'Equisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain. For at the moment in which we have always supposed him to have been at work on his contributions to The Anarchiad, Barlow was already poised on the very threshold of his ideological conversion; he would set sail for England in a matter of months after The Anarchiad had been brought to completion, and the next voice the world would hear would be that of the radical Barlow who speaks so thunderously in Advice to the Privileged Orders, A Letter to the National Convention, and The Conspiracy of Kings.

The special problem posed by The Anarchiad is thus the way it complicates the account usually given of Barlow's ideological conversion, which has been told, generally speaking, as the story of his abandonment of a settled and traditional Connecticut Federalism in favor of more democratic or progressive ideals. For the great point about Federalism in this context is that it was neither settled nor traditional, that it was born as an ideology at the same time and out of precisely the same turbulent circumstances as The Anarchiad itself: Shays's Rebellion, the paper-money crisis in Rhode Island and elsewhere, and the mounting demands of a radical egalitarianism that directly anticipated the Jacobin radicalism of the French Revolution. A particular value of The Anarchiad now, as Robert D. Amer has recently demonstrated [in American Literature, 1764-1789, ed. by Everett Emerson, 1977] is just that it so vividly allows us to recover a sense of Federalism as an ideology born in crisis:

For see! proud Faction waves her flaming brand,
And discord riots o'er the ungrateful land;
Lo! to the north, a wild, adventurous crew,
In desperate mobs, the savage state renew;
Each felon chief his maddening thousands draws,
And claims bold license from the bond of laws.(57)

This is from The Anarchiad no. 10, the installment of the poem published on the eve of the Philadelphia Convention and portraying in urgent terms postrevolutionary America as it appeared to those who were even now emerging as Federalists, spokesmen for a limited or tempered revolution that would preserve the rights won by Americans while forestalling a dissolution into anarchy and bloodshed. It was, as David Humphreys would say with an air of profound relief in 1789, shortly after the adoption of the new federal Constitution, the very "hour of humiliation" in which America discovered she had no government at all, in which men had begun seriously to dread "that the prospect of national happiness, which invigorated our arms and cheered our hearts through the perilous struggle for independence, must vanish for ever from our view: and that the hope of establishing the empire of reason, justice, philosophy, and religion … would be considered but the illusion of a heated imagination." For what could be more humiliating to those who had fought for American independence, asked Humphreys rhetorically, "than to perceive our countrymen ready to rush headlong on their ruin—ready to destroy the asylum which was just offered for suffering humanity—ready to verify the predictions of our foes, that our independence would prove a curse to its votaries?"

The America of Anarchiad no. 10, in short, is a polity poised on the very brink of the sort of collapse into anarchy and terror that within a few short years would so disillusion most early sympathizers with the French Revolution, the bloodshed and mob violence and reckless demagoguery that would call forth Burke's bitter polemic in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. The very essence of Federalism as an ethic of balance and restraint forged in a prolonged moment of national crisis is caught in no. 10's dark vision of uncontrolled democracy as a state of affairs always veering uncontrollably towards mere anarchy:

Nor less abhor'd, the certain woe that waits
The giddy rage of democratic States,
Whose pop'lar breath, high-blown in restless tide,
No laws can temper, and no reason guide:
An equal sway, their mind indignant spurns,
To wanton change, the bliss of freedom turns;
Led by wild demagogues, the factious crowd,
Mean, fierce, imperious, insolent and loud,
Nor fame, nor wealth, nor power, nor system draws.(61)

When events in France do take their bloody turn towards regicide and Terror, by the same token, it will seem to many of Federalist temperament, looking back on these perilous months in 1786-1787, that America in her hour of postrevolutionary crisis had escaped a similar fate by only the narrowest of margins. This is what lends a special urgency, for instance, to David Humphreys's angry sonnet "On the Murders Committed by the Jacobin Faction in the Early Period of the French Revolution," and in particular to his heated denial that the American and French Revolutions embody an identical set of republican principles: "Those blood-stain'd Jacobins in turn shall fall,/Murd'rers of millions under freedom's name!/But not the blood that delug'd frantic Gaul,/In calm Columbia quenches reason's flame,/Or blots with bloody slur our fair Republic's fame" (237). The republic whose fair name Humphreys is defending at such moments, the "empire of reason, justice, philosophy, and religion" of which he had spoken in his 1789 oration, is precisely the vision of the republic urged in satiric terms throughout The Anarchiad, its always-implied alternative to the gloomy picture of an America ruled by "desperate mobs" and "wild demagogues."

Yet the reason Humphreys feels so strongly compelled to dissociate the American Revolution from the events running their fateful course in France is precisely that certain ideologues, not only among the French radicals but among his own countrymen, had proclaimed the two revolutions to be, in essence, the same revolution. There is, even at this distance, a certain poignancy in our awareness that chief among these was Barlow, Humphreys's old friend from Hartford days and his collaborator on The Anarchiad. In point of fact, of course, Barlow would stop short of attempting to justify either the execution of Louis XVI or the Reign of Terror—would, in fact, feel himself to be in some danger from the Revolutionary Tribunal during a period when so staunch a republican as Paine could be arrested and imprisoned—but the Barlow whose voice was heard at home was nonetheless the uncompromising radical of Advice to the Privileged Orders, calling for death to tyrants everywhere and thus associated in the public mind with the worst subsequent excesses of the French Revolution.

Although Barlow's voice in Advice to the Privileged Orders and Letter to the National Convention is less the voice of an American citizen merely than of a member of what in The Columbiad he will call "the commonwealth of man," its authority always derives from his own firsthand familiarity with the great American experiment in republican government, that successful revolution against tyranny that so many French revolutionists took as their model in the heady period of constitution-making that preceded the Reign of Terror. This is especially true of Barlow's most radical utterance during this same period, The Conspiracy of Kings, a poem addressed, as its title page announces, "to the inhabitants of Europe, from another quarter of the world" (1: 67). The voice of the speaker in The Conspiracy of Kings is specifically the voice of the New World, radiant with its own millenarian promise, congratulating the Old on its slightly tardier approach to earthly glory:

From Orders, Slaves and Kings,
To thee, O MAN, my heart rebounding springs.
Behold th' ascending bliss that waits your call, …
From shade to light, from grief to glory rise.
Freedom at last, with Reason in her train,
Extends o'er earth everlasting reign;
See Gallia's sons, so late the tyrants' sport,
Machines in war and sychophants at court,
Start into men, expand their well-taught mind,
Lords of themselves and leaders of mankind.(1:82)

This is the Barlow who denounces Burke as a "degenerate slave" for having presumed to doubt the wisdom and motivation of the French revolutionists, and whose own vision of history is that of a dark conspiracy among the privileged few to maintain themselves in power and obscene opulence while millions starve. It is the Barlow, in short, whose name will almost from this moment be anathema to the New Haven and Hartford friends in whose company he had come intellectually of age. The seriousness of the rupture would become outwardly apparent only in 1804, when on returning to the United States Barlow would choose as his place of residence the new national capital, with Jefferson in the White House, rather than his own state of Connecticut, but it is to all intents and purposes complete now, as Barlow rapturously celebrates the fall of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the rise of France "from shade to light, from grief to glory." The distance between Barlow and such men as Timothy Dwight and David Humphreys at this moment might be very precisely measured, we would normally be entitled to suppose, as the ideological distance separating The Conspiracy of Kings from The Anarchiad.

Yet we are not entitled to suppose this, for what a careful comparative reading of The Anarchiad and The Conspiracy of Kings discloses is that, as W.B. Otis noticed almost parenthetically at the beginning of our own century [in American Verse, 1625-1807, 1909], none other than Joel Barlow is the author of Anarchiad no. 10, precisely that blistering attack on the "giddy rage" of popular insurrection that virtually epitomizes the Federalist reaction to radical republicanism and unbridled democracy. This is the context in which what I have called the compositional and ideological puzzles posed by The Anarchiad collapse suddenly and rather dramatically into a single larger puzzle, for the evidence that Barlow wrote Anarchiad no. 10 is certain lines then taken over almost without alteration into The Conspiracy of Kings. There is, to be sure, a shift in context. In The Anarchiad, Barlow is warning his American readers about the state of tyranny that must inevitably ensue if the downward spin into anarchy is not halted forthwith:

Go, view the lands to lawless power a prey,
Where tyrants govern with unbounded sway; …
High on the moving throne, and near the van,
The tyrant rides, the chosen scourge of man:
Clarions, and flutes, and drums, his way prepare,
And shouting millions rend the conscious air—
Millions, whose ceaseless toils the pomp sustain,
Whose hour of stupid joy repays an age of pain.(59-60)

In The Conspiracy of Kings, on the other hand, Barlow is speaking in the conventionally outraged tones of European radicalism about the weight of feudal institutions on masses so oppressed that they do not recognize their own misery:

The gazing crowd, of glittering State afraid,
Adore the Power their coward meanness made; …
High on a moving throne, and near the van,
The tyrant rides, the chosen scourge of man;
Clarions and flutes and drums his way prepare,
And shouting millions rend the troubled air;
Millions, whose ceaseless toils the pomp sustain;
Whose hour of stupid joy repays an age of pain.
(1:82)

Nonetheless, the two passages are not only nearly identical but have their origin in an identical sense of moral outrage, which is why the glimpse they provide of Barlow's deepest ideological convictions strongly suggests that the story of his "conversion" demands to be told in somewhat altered terms. For what becomes obvious is that the notion of a sudden or abrupt personal transformation, a Barlow who at home encounters Shays's Rebellion as a staunch Federalist and then surfaces in Paris a few years later cheering on the sans-culottes, has never been more than a convenient myth. It is, to be sure, a myth containing an element of truth, for what remains true is that Dwight and Humphreys and Trumbull mistook Barlow for a kindred spirit right up to his departure for England in 1788—Humphreys, in particular, would never have agreed to literary collaboration with the Barlow who wrote The Conspiracy of Kings—but it also ignores the insistent evidence that Barlow's conversion to radical principles had taken place much earlier and had been much more gradual than we have supposed. The great question about Barlow's political convictions thus concerns not some sudden shift to an unforeseen radicalism, but the nature of a radicalism that could for so long go unremarked by friends who were to emerge as major voices of New England Federalism.

This is the feature of Barlow's ideological situation that instructs us to look for a system of symbols or concepts ambiguous enough to permit him openly to express his most radical sentiments even while being read by Dwight and Humphreys as a writer loyal to their own Federalist convictions. For it is the essence of the puzzle here that Barlow made absolutely no attempt to disguise his growing allegiance to an emergent set of radical ideals as yet unglimpsed by his Connecticut contemporaries. Had he simply talked one way among his friends and thought another way in private the problem of his political convictions, and these as they governed his poetic expression from the early Prospect of Peace to The Columbiad, would cease to be problematical. The problem arises precisely because, in both The Vision of Columbus and his contributions to The Anarchiad, Barlow was, if one but knew how to read, publishing his most radical notions for all to see. This is the moral of those lines and verses that could be carried forward with little or no alteration from The Anarchiad to The Conspiracy of Kings.

The shared system of symbols or concepts that permitted Barlow and his circle to imagine themselves as dwelling in a state of ideological consensus, providing what Frederic Jameson calls [in The Political Unconscious, 1981] "the general unity of a shared code," comes into view most readily, I think, when we look back at that period of illusory consensus in light of the rupture that eventually took place. For this was a rupture not just between Barlow on the one side and Dwight and Humphreys on the other, but, as John Griffiths has persuasively argued [in Early American Literature 10 (1975-76)], between two visions or theories of history: the "progressive linearism," as P. A. Sorokin calls it [in Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1937], associated with Condorcet or Paine or Barlow's own Columbiad, and the cyclical theory, inherited from Herodotus and Aristotle and Polybius, that was a central feature of civic humanism or classical republicanism as it has recently been so brilliantly analyzed in the work of J. G. A. Pocock and others. This was the theory that Dwight, in particular, had taken over from literary Augustanism—his eager reading of Pope and Thomson and other Opposition poets in his undergraduate days at Yale—and had reinterpreted to fit harmoniously with the orthodox Calvinism of his own Northampton upbringing. The monument of his synthesizing energies is his poem Greenfield Hill.

So greatly does Dwight succeed in expressing a cyclical vision of history in Calvinist vocabulary, in fact, that there has always been a temptation to represent his ideological breach with Barlow exclusively in terms of competing millenarian visions. Dwight on this account is the orthodox Puritan poet and clergyman who insists on an orthodox view of the millennium as an earthly prelude to actual Apocalypse, the Day of Doom and the immolation of created nature in fire and ruin, while Barlow in his later years has become the secular millenarian, looking forward not to some airy Jerusalem in the clouds but to an earthly millennium of social and political equality brought about by the ineluctable forces of a progressive history. Such works as Advice to the Privileged Orders and The Columbiad would by this token be anticipations of Hegel's grand project of relocating the telos of divine Providence within a History dialectically conceived, or, more pertinently for the idea of a "radical" Barlow, the salvational story that Marx, under Hegel's inspiration, would present in Das Kapital and elsewhere as a scientific theory of history.

This picture of Barlow, which has been the basis of some of the best work done on him as a writer, contains a great deal of truth. This was the Barlow some years ago of Tuveson's Redeemer Nation, for instance, and it is today the Barlow, to one or another extent, of Mason Lowance and Cecelia Tichi and Ruth Bloch. Should we emphasize the writer whose secular millenarianism constantly felt the backward pull of an earlier Calvinism, on the other hand, we have the conflicted and very often contradictory Barlow of Leon Howard [in The Connecticut Wits, 1943] and, more recently, Emory Elliott [in Revolutionary Writers, 1725-1810, 1982], trying in works like The Vision of Columbus to fight his way free of an inherited system of theological and moral values into the emancipatory space portended by a progressive vision of history. There is a great deal of truth in this picture as well, and as Leon Howard demonstrated more than thirty years ago in an argument that still exerts its force (see "An Age of Contradiction"), it is simultaneously a truth about the situation of the writer in the early American republic. The code shared by Barlow and such men as Dwight and Humphreys would on this account be an orthodox or Puritan millenarianism taken by him, under the influence of writers like Paine and Richard Price, in a wholly unorthodox direction.

The great problem with so otherwise attractive an hypothesis is that it leaves altogether out of account that cyclical theory of history that Griffiths sees as being the major point of ideological contention between Dwight and Barlow. For the cyclical theory is crucial in this context, quite apart from the question of Barlow's breach with his friends, as a major part of the explanation of how men as conservative in temperament and values as Dwight and Humphreys became wholehearted supporters of the American Revolution. In the immediate background here, in short, lies not simply the cyclical theory of history but the ideological paradigm of civic humanism of which it was a central element, and in particular the local version of civic humanism called Country ideology which scholars like Pocock and Bailyn and Gordon Wood have shown to be one of the ideological wellsprings of the revolution in the American colonies. It is Barlow's use of the language of civic humanism, I want to argue, always taken by Dwight and Humphreys to imply a cyclical vision of history identical to their own, that would mask Barlow's growing progressivism right through the period of The Anarchiad, thus allowing Barlow, guiltless of prevarication or duplicity, to sail for England unrevealed as a radical.

This is the context in which Barlow's incorporation of verses from The Anarchiad into The Conspiracy of Kings amounts to an ideological unveiling, a public announcement that the classical-republican or civic-humanist ideals he once shared with his Connecticut circle have undergone a transmutation into radical republicanism of the sort associated with Price or Priestly or the later Tom Paine. For to read Barlow's portrayal of the tyrant as "the scourge of man" as it occurs in The Conspiracy of Kings, his angry description of societies where the "ceaseless toil" of oppressed millions sustains the pomp of a privileged few, is immediately to recognize that we are in the near vicinity of a radical manifesto like Paine's The Rights of Man. Yet when the identical lines are transposed back into their original context in Anarchiad no. 10, the effect is one almost of perceptual illusion, for now Barlow is just as recognizably speaking a language perfectly in accord with the Federalist vision of Dwight and Humphreys. Here, for instance, is Dwight in Greenfield Hill, describing European society as a sphere where the rich are born to "foul oppression," where tyrants and aristocrats riot on wealth wrung "from plunder'd throngs," and where ordinary subjects die by the millions in mere power struggles among sovereigns (by "crimes of balanced sway" Dwight here means "wars wrongfully fought to preserve the illusory ideal of a 'balance of power' "):

See, far remote, the crimes of balanced sway!
Where courts contract the debt, and subject pay;
The black intrigue, the crush of self-defence,
Th' enlistment dire, foul press, and tax immense,
Navies, and hosts, that gorge Potosi whole;
Bribes, places, pensions, and the auction'd soul:
Ills, that, each hour, invoke the wrath of God,
And bid the world's wide surface smoke with blood,
Waste human good, in slavery nations bind,
And speed untimely death to half mankind.
(510; VII, 95-105)

In retrospect, of course, we are able to see that Dwight's language here includes elements almost never found in Barlow's poetry, even in such early effusions as The Prospect of Peace and the Yale Commencement poem of 1781. This is the language of corruption and civic degeneration taken over directly from the Opposition poetry of Augustan England, the terms—"Bribes, places, pensions, and the auction'd soul"—of the unremitting struggle fought by Pope, Swift, Bolingbroke, Thomson, and scores of lesser poets and polemicists against Walpole and the Robinocracy, demonic representatives of a modernity in which stockjobbers and finance managers were engrossing to themselves the power earlier reserved to the landed classes, and in which the values of traditional society were being irresistibly eroded by the impersonal forces of a new money or market economy. It is the language, in short, of literary Augustanism and Country ideology as these would sustain, in the poetry of Dwight and Humphreys, a vision of America as the early Roman republic providentially reborn as the young United States, a revolution in the cycles of history that, at a time when Europe has grown old and irredeemably corrupt, has on American soil re-created the state of virtuous simplicity and hardy patriotism celebrated in Livy's history or Virgil's Georgics.

This imagined world would during the next thirty or forty years of American history give way ideologically to the earthly millennium envisioned in the progressive theory of the later Barlow—thus leaving writers like Dwight and Humphreys, not coincidentally, the speakers of a lost poetic and mythological language—but at the moment of The Anarchiad it is particularly easy to see the manner in which two alternative schemes of historical change and civic virtue for a time converged and overlapped, with the cyclical and progressive theories of history, the older classical-republican and the newer radical-republican visions of human society, seeming for a time to be mutually intelligible and even mutually affirming. This is the moment of ideological convergence in which Dwight or Humphreys could pick up Anarchiad no. 10 and, reading there a denunciation of corrupt European states that echoed a score of similar passages in their own poetry, could see in Barlow's denunciations of tyranny nothing more than a mirror of their own deeply held Federalist convictions.

A last complication arises from Barlow's authorship of Anarchiad no. 10, however, one having to do with the degree to which, even as he is about to break free of that illusory consensus he shared with Dwight and Humphreys and Trumbull, he is still speaking the language of civic humanism and cyclical history that he himself had learned from literary Augustanism and the tradition of Graeco-Roman historiography from which it drew its sustaining myths. This is the significance, for instance, of Barlow's sincere and angry denunciation, at the time of Shays's Rebellion and the paper-money crisis, of "the giddy rage of democratic States," which directly follows a blistering attack on monarchical government ("Hereditary kings, by right divine") and government by oligarchy (where "each aristocrat affects a throne"). This is the theme, tracing back through Florentine political theory to Polybius and Aristotle's Politics, of states that retain their civic virtue by ensuring a perpetual balance among the powers of the one, the few, and the many, thus preventing a degeneration into tyranny, oligarchy, or democracy in their unmixed, and therefore highly unstable, states.

In the immediate background of Barlow's denunciation of the Shays rebels as a desperate mob caught up in giddy rage, then, there lies a wisdom going back to Plato and Aristotle concerning the inevitability that states degenerating into anarchy will pass into the control of a single strong ruler able to control lawlessness and restore order by force. It is the same wisdom, ironically enough, that will lie behind Burke's uncanny "prediction" of the rise of Napoleon in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and it permits us to see the sense in which, even during the great ideological fissuring that occurs in the last decade of the eighteenth century in both England and America, all parties to that increasingly bitter dispute were yet speaking a common language. For the Barlow who in The Conspiracy of Kings will denounce Burke as a "degenerate slave," and who will attack him as well in Advice to the Privileged Orders, is here in The Anarchiad still drawing confidently on a Polybian theory of the mixed or balanced state taken by both him and Burke from the civic humanist tradition that will, during these same years, also sustain the Federalist vision of Dwight and Humphreys.

The great monument of Polybian theory in American history is, of course, the federal Constitution, miraculous as a compromise not least because it was able one last time to reactivate the improbable ideological consensus that had carried a wildly disparate group of leading spirits, solid personages like John Adams and Timothy Dwight as well as fiery souls like Samuel Adams or Patrick Henry, through the War of Independence in unanimous opposition to British tyranny. If the episode of Barlow's contributions to The Anarchiad suggests anything, it is that this consensus as well was the unintended consequence of ideological convergence, a certain limited and privileged moment in which men employing separate political vocabularies and inhabiting separate mental worlds could suppose themselves to be making identical sense out of issues identically urgent to them and their fellow citizens. So far as the tenth number of The Anarchiad contributed to that last reactivation of consensus, and thus to the making of the Constitution, it was Joel Barlow's valedictory gift to the Connecticut friends whose values, at bottom, he had never really shared.

William Bradley Otis

SOURCE: "Political and Satirical Verse," in American Verse 1625-1807, Moffat, Yard and Company, 1909, pp. 88-171.

[In the excerpt below, Otis considers Trumbull's M'Fingal and Barlow's Columbiad as two of the most important literary productions of the Connecticut Wits.]

The most popular and by far the best of the Revolutionary satires, both in plan and execution, is the McFingal of John Trumbull. It is a mock-heroic modelled upon Hudibras, and is scarcely inferior to Butler's masterpiece in the sparkling quality of its wit. MceFingal was written at the urgent request of members of the American Congress, who believed that Trumbull could aid the cause of Independence by writing a poem which should weaken the Tory cause by turning it to ridicule. The first two cantos were published in Philadelphia in 1775, when the author was but twenty-five years of age. The poem was not completed until 1782, and was published that year in its final form at Hartford. McFingal is represented as a blustering, self-assured Tory squire. He lives in a village near Boston, is a justice of the peace, and in Town Meeting makes long speeches against the Whigs. His over-emphasis of attack reacts upon and injures his own cause:

Thus stored with intellectual riches,
Skill'd was our Squire in making speeches;
Where strength of brains united centers
With strength of lungs surpassing Stentor's.
But as some muskets so contrive it,
As oft to miss the mark they drive at,
And though well aim'd at duck or plover,
Bear wide, and kick their owners over;
So fared our Squire, whose reasoning toil
Would often on himself recoil,
And so much injured more his side,
The stronger arguments he applied.

McFingal is "the vilest Tory in the town," and he finally makes himself so obnoxious that he is tarred, feathered, and ridden around town followed by a hooting mob. All besmeared with tar he returns home, summons his Tory companions to a secret meeting in his cellar, and relates to them a "vision" which has suddenly come to him since the tarring. He announces that his prophetic sense of "second sight" has made it clear that the American cause will win, that the colonists will be free and independent, and that a great and flourishing nation will arise. He advises his fellow Tories to waste no time in joining the Whigs. Just at this moment a panic is created among those assembled in the cellar by a report that the Whigs have returned with a mob upon hearing that a Tory meeting is in secret session. The lights are extinguished and McFingal, escaping through a window, flees to Boston. Thus the poem ends.

McFingal was written for a special purpose at a special time, and was written for the masses. No doubt the Yale tutor would have preferred a more elevated style, but it was necessary to appeal to the people in a familiar, and even in a coarse, manner. What Trumbull considered the higher art was sacrificed for love of country. The author had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and he embodied it in crisp, snappy couplets. He was thoroughly familiar with the public men and events of the day, and there were very few Tories of prominence who escaped the trenchant quality of his wit. McFingal went through more than thirty editions, and the influence of the poem in aiding and encouraging the spirit of independence can hardly be overestimated.…

As a statesman, a financier, a man of affairs, [Joel] Barlow was a person of brilliant and exceptional ability. As a poet, too, he had powers which, with proper pruning and training, might have resulted in productions of permanent beauty. That this army chaplain, honorary citizen of the French Republic, spectacular financier and negotiator of national treaties, had a magnificent and poetic vision there can be no question. Had he not attempted to soar so high, in flights which his talents could not sustain; had he been content to give us his spontaneous self as in The Hasty Pudding, and to class himself with lesser bards than Homer and Virgil, much could have been forgiven. This man of the world who, in his relations with princes and kings, displayed remarkable wisdom and tact, at one period in his life lost the sense of true proportion, and wrote The Columbiad. The Vision of Columbus, upon which the larger poem is based, was published, in modest form, in 1787, and received favorable notice in America, France, and England. Although too long it was exactly what the title indicated,—a vision. The talents which it displayed were sufficient to bring its author at once prominently before the public as a leading American man of letters. Stimulated by this success into an incomprehensible and inordinate vanity, Barlow at once began preparations for the enlargement of his poem into the epic form. The Columbiad was published in Philadelphia in 1807, in quarto, dedicated to the author's intimate friend, Robert Fulton, and embellished with twelve engravings from designs by Smirke, executed by the best London engravers. The edition was so large and costly that only men of means could afford a copy. There was something in the overgrown size of the book so in accord with the inflated plan of the poem that critics were not slow in appropriating the idea. The Columbiad was as generally condemned as The Vision had been applauded. The principal idea of the poet is simple enough. Columbus, lying in chains in a dungeon of King Ferdinand's palace in Valladolid, is bemoaning his fate when suddenly

O'er all the dungeon, where black arches bend,
The roofs unfold, and streams of light descend.

This supernatural manifestation is the prelude to the entrance of Hesper, brother of Atlas, "the guardian Genius of the Western Continent," who proceeds to lead Columbus forth to the Mount of Vision "which rises o'er the western coast of Spain." From this tremendous height, and with the aid of miraculous vision granted by Hesper, Columbus scans the world of the past, present, and future, and is recompensed for his misery in the knowledge that his great discovery is destined to work through untold ages for the amelioration of mankind. Over seven thousand lines are required to portray and interpret the glorious destiny which is to be America's. After a description of the physical characteristics of the new continent, and a discussion of the origin of tribes and nations, the poet digresses into a long history of Peru. Having next explained the beneficent influence upon Europe of Columbus's discovery, Hesper turns again to America. Here the formation of the colonies, the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars, are each in turn exhausted for material to feed the appetite of this insatiate epic.

The national freedom in which the Revolution resulted serves as a basis of attack upon African slavery in America. Why deny to the negro that personal liberty for which the colonists themselves have just shed so much blood? This portion of the poem is one of the most commendable, and in places rises to high poetic majesty. The last two books concern themselves with a philosophic disquisition on the general nature of progress and enlightenment, in which republicanism is the most efficacious factor, and the poem closes with an optimistic look into the future, to the time when wars shall cease and when all mankind will be united in political unity and brotherly love. Even as a "vision" such a poem must have appeared grandiose in the hands of any but a poet of the first rank, and not even genius could have moulded it into epic form. It lacks the carrying power of epic narrative, and is destitute of the first of all considerations, epic unity. The digressions are too many and lengthy, and are too loosely hung upon the framework of the central idea. In reading the poem one is impressed with the lack of compactness, of consistency, of purpose, of goal. The mind of the poet is "uneasily swelling" [Moses Coit Tyler, Three Men of Letters] with some great conception of which he is not master. The imagery, for the most part, is laborious and vague, and the vocabulary extravagant. When The Columbiad was issued, twenty years had passed since the publications of The Vision of Columbus. In the meantime America had been developing a taste for letters and had made some advance in the field of literary criticism. Moreover, these twenty years had seen tremendous strides in the growth of Romanticism, and The Columbiad, with its heroic verse, came, a belated traveller, to find the school of Pope in eclipse, and Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge the new captains of literary progress.

But while The Columbiad failed as a work of art, it will live in literary history, partly because of the titanic nature of the failure itself, but more especially because of the impulse which gave it birth. Barlow, as all the "Hartford Wits," was filled with a genuine and overflowing love of country, not a provincial passion, but one, as we have seen, broad enough to include in vision the whole of mankind. He was a thorough republican, and hoped and believed that the nations of the world would all eventually adopt that form of government. Moreover, the ethical purpose of the poem is evident in all parts of the work. "My object," he says, "is altogether of a moral and political nature. I wish to encourage and strengthen, in the rising generation, a sense of the importance of republican institutions, as being the great foundation of public and private happiness, the necessary aliment of future and permanent meliorations in the condition of human nature." And in a letter [dated 1809] to his friend Henri Gregoire, formerly Bishop of Blois, in reply to the latter's assertion that The Columbiad was detrimental to religion, Barlow says:

On the contrary, I believe, and you have compelled me on this occasion to express my belief, that the Columbiad, taken in all its parts of text and notes and preface, is more favorable to sound and rigid morals, more friendly to virtue, more clear and unequivocal in pointing out the road to national dignity and individual happiness, more energetic in its denunciations of tyranny and oppression in every shape, injustice and wickedness in all their forms, and consequently more consonant to what you acknowledge to be the spirit of the gospel, than all the writings of all that list of Christian authors of the three last ages whom you have cited as the glory of Christendom, and strung them on the alphabet, from Addison to Winkelman. Understand me right, my just and generous friend; I judge not my poem as a work of genius. I cannot judge it nor class it nor compare it in that respect, because it is my own. But I know it is a moral work; I can judge and dare pronounce upon its tendency, its beneficial effect upon every candid mind, and I am confident you will yet join me in opinion.

This frank statement forced from the author in self-defense may be accepted as essentially true. As an opponent of war, of slavery, of every kind of moral and political evil, as an upholder of personal and institutional virtue, Joel Barlow's Columbiad was in spirit distinctly ethical. And in this it was distinctly American and a legitimate descendant of the earlier Puritan literature. The Columbiad, then, while a failure as a work of art, deserves recognition in the history of American literature because it typified three of the most important national characteristics of the time,—love of country, enthusiasm for republican principles, and emphasis upon the ethical in its application to national life.…