SOURCE: Lang, Hans-Joachim. “The Rising Glory of America and the Falling Price of Intellect: The Careers of Brackenridge and Freneau.” In The Transit of Civilization from Europe to America: Essays in Honor of Hans Galinsky, edited by Winfried Herget and Karl Ortseifen, pp. 131-43. Tübingen: Narr, 1986.

[In the following essay, Lang examines the collaboration between Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge on the 1772 Princeton commencement poem, The Rising Glory of America.]

At a conference devoted to “The Transit of Civilization from Europe to America”, a paper dealing with the plight of the American writer in revolutionary and post-revolutionary times could find no more convenient starting point than A Poem, On “The Rising Glory of America”, published in 1772 by two graduates from the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau.¹ Kenneth Silverman opens his Cultural History of the American Revolution with this idea so flattering to colonials (“Commencement: 1763”), pointing out that “Translatio studii was more than a future promise or a theory, however; it was also a factual explanation of the present … Each fresh accession of some major element of European culture brought confident visions of an American Empire” (9-10). Two hundred years later the phrase was still current enough to be used as the title for Gordon S. Wood's collection of documents and articles on the cultural scene of the early republic. A similar collection, though, Robert E. Spiller's The American Literary Revolution, 1783-1837, put another text by Freneau at the helm: “Advice to Authors: By the late Mr. Robert Slender.” According to Freneau,

Authors (such I mean as are not possessed of fortunes) are at present considered as the dregs of the community: their situation and prospects are truly humiliating, and any other sett of men in a similar state of calamitous adversity would unite together for their mutual defence instead of worrying and lampooning each other for the amusement of the illiberal vulgar.

It is a matter of historical perspective whether we stress the ultimate achievement or the price paid by such figures as are called, somewhat glibly, ‘transitional’ by future historians. Providential views of history (including, of course, secularized versions) are usually long on design (God's, nature's, or history's) and short on detail. Detail, not unreasonably, is regarded as the devil's realm, to be shunned by the pious.

Another matter of historical perspective is our selection of topics thought to be relevant. Looking for newness in the New World and giving “firsts” their proleptic and symbolic dues is certainly an honorable occupation but runs the risk of missing the integral historic experience. A standard work such as Russel B. Nye's The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830 disappoints us when we use its index under the three heads: Napoleon, Gibbon, and Edmund Burke. Under “Napoleon” we find nothing; a fact from which we have to conclude either that Americans were not interested in Napoleon, only in Jackson, or—the first alternative being patently untrue—that somehow American interest in Napoleon does not fall into the category of “cultural life of the new nation.” Likewise, we do not find anything under “Gibbon”, although History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published between 1776 and 1788, while Americans were infatuated with “a powerfully resonant ‘Catonic’ image” (Silverman 83, following B. Bailyn). Nor do two references to Burke satisfy our curiosity regarding his ‘presence’ in the United States, a point to be taken up later on.

Among the virtues of Silverman's approach to the transit-of-civilization concept is the fact that he takes its chronological aspect as seriously as its international scope, warning us that

The heliotropic theory of progress merely raised to the level of generalization the fact that the British colonies in 1770 were becoming cosmopolitan. The theory … should not be confused with the calls for cultural independence by nineteenth-century nationalists.

(Silverman 234)

But when he distinguishes Freneau's and Brackenridge's view of history and progress as ‘linear’ from Trumbull's ‘cyclic’ and Dwight's ‘providential’ theories, he underrates the complications of this collaborative text (232). We have to work our way back to the College of New Jersey, President John Witherspoon, and to the Commencement exercises of September 25, 1771.

I

If there is any one figure impersonating translatio studii from Europe to America it certainly is John Witherspoon (1722-1794). He himself, as quoted by his biographer, connected his success as clergyman, educator, and statesman with his status as a European:

A person educated in the old countries … had a degree of rank and credit from the circumstance independent of any other. I think the Americans were even partial in this respect. I believe had I myself been born and educated in America, I should have met with a degree of acceptance and success in my station far inferior to what actually happened.

(Collins 2:195)

His Scottish origin complicated his American acceptance somewhat. Ezra Stiles, reflecting the current anti-Scottish prejudice of revolutionary America, complained that Witherspoon and lawyer Wilson of Pennsylvania were “strongly national can't bear any Thing in Congress which reflects on Scotland”; also that “The Dr. is a politician. We may use him as far as he is for America—but scorn to be awed by him into an ignominious Silence in the subject of Scots Perfidy & Tyranny & Enmity to America”, while loyalist Jonathan Odell saw in “Witherspoon the great” only the Presbyterian radical:

Scotland confess'd him sensible and shrewd,
Austere and rigid; many thought him good.
But turbulence of temper spoil'd the whole,
And show'd the movements of his inmost soul.
Disclos'd machinery loses of its force;
He felt the fact, and westward bent his course.
Princeton received him, bright amidst his flaws,
And saw him labour in the good old cause;
Saw him promote the meritorious work,
The hate of kings, and glory of the kirk.

(Collins, 2:188-9 and 1:184)

But Witherspoon's success in giving “the College of New Jersey a more truly national constituency than any other American college enjoyed in the eighteenth century” (Butterfield xiii), as well as the nonsectarian atmosphere of its classical, philosophical and literary culture, were too obvious for prejudice or slander. A brilliant group of future statesmen and writers—James Madison, Aaron Burr, H. H. Brackenridge and Philip Freneau—made Princeton as important as Yale, although its group of writers was less homogeneous than the original clan of Connecticut Wits. In retrospect, early differentiations among Princetonians are easily recognizable. The President himself held a poor opinion of novels, admiration of female beauty and other extravagances (Collins 2:185-6), and although tolerant of ‘Americanisms’ and ‘Scoticisms’ in speech, he came down hard on ‘vulgarisms’ (Mathews 13-30). The Princeton student who made the Presidency, Madison, opined, only two years after graduation, that

Poetry, wit, and criticism, romances, plays, &c., captivated me much; but I began to discover that they deserve but a small portion of a mortal's time, and that something more substantial, more durable, and more profitable, befits a riper age.

(Quoted from M. D. Bell xix).

It is ironic that of our two Princetonian writers it was Freneau, not Brackenridge, who continued to cultivate the “rising glory” concept and was connected with the poem of 1772 in public literary opinion, although his own career was more checkered, less satisfactory and carried with it more bitterness than Brackenridge's. Freneau, for the 1786 collection of his Poems, rescued “such parts … as were written by the author of these Volumes” (42), republishing them in his collections of 1795 and 1809, while Evert A. Duyckinck in his edition of Poems Relating to the American Revolution by Philip Freneau (1865) even gave the “Rising Glory of America” the place of honor at the head of the volume. No wonder that Freneau, not Brackenridge, was held responsible for “a mythic conception of American destiny” (Andrews, see below), for envisioning “human progress destined to occur within the Christian schedule of the Apocalypse” (Tichi 96); no wonder even that he should have been referred to as the author of “a commencement ode written by Freneau and delivered by Hugh Henry Brackenridge …” (Andrews 140).

The trouble is that the traditional stories about the Commencement poem seem to be all wrong. After two readings (at a distance of several months) of “The Respective Roles of Hugh Brackenridge and Philip Freneau in Composing ‘The Rising Glory of America’”, the present writer cannot help feeling that J. F. S. Smeall is basically right, even if several details remain speculative. Not everything discovered by Smeall is equally pertinent to an inquiry which uses “The Rising Glory of America” as a mere starting point, but the following seven points should be interesting for a comparative evaluation of the careers of Brackenridge and Freneau: (1) Not only two, but “three distinct acts of publication and three quite different versions of the poem” existed, even if the text of the earliest one, the Commencement poem, is lost (Smeall 263). (2) This poem, estimated at “about 340 lines”, was not a collaboration, not a dialogue for three voices, but an ode for one voice, written and read by Brackenridge. (3) The text printed in 1772 was an (uneasy) collaboration: “And perhaps because the two poets had distinct, almost contradictory images of the American Indians, of the ‘good life’ in America, and of America's destiny, Freneau's dialogue form was retained for the conflation” (265). (4) In 1786, Freneau extracted his parts from the 1772 text, discarded some lines, corrected and polished others, brought his references and style up to date and added 146 new lines (265). By a sophisticated method of comparisons Smeall further showed how (5) several arguments of 1772 were developed twice: “And comparison reveals sharp differences, almost contradictions, between the rejected developments by Brackenridge and the retained developments by Freneau. It is possible to speak of distinct, almost irreconcilable idiosyncracies of image and structure, that mark the work of each collaborator” (274). The main difference, regarding the main theme, America's future glory, is that “Brackenridge's 113-line development is confidently apocalyptic and progressist”, whereas Freneau's “interrupted, 76-line apocalypse … is hesitant, melancholy, nonprogressist. It is less a vision than a prayer for vision …” (275). The upshot (6) is that the Freneau and Brackenridge sequences, respectively, “give a coherent sequence of arguments to support the rising-glory theme” (277), while the 1772 conflation tends to be self-contradictory. The last point (7) to be extracted from Smeall's ingenious and persuasive article concerns milieu: Brackenridge, according to the printed Commencement program, “spoke” the text of 1771; “creation seemed to a great degree to be institutional. And 1772 issued anonymously, as do many institutionally created, collaborative texts. Not until 1786 could Freneau assert, retrospectively, an idiosyncratic creativity” (281).

President Witherspoon was a good prophet of future glory when young Brackenridge quoted to him Juvenal's lines—

Haud facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obstat
Res angusta domi—

and when he replied: “‘There you are wrong, young man! … it is only your res angusta domi men that do emerge!’” (Collins 1:141)

II

Another point to be made concerning the concept of “The Rising Glory of America” is the impossibility of making it work except in the most general terms. Bishop Berkeley's poem “America or the Muse's Refuge” was called “A prophecy”:

There shall be sung another golden Age,
          The rise of Empire and of Arts,
The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage,
          The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts.

(7:370)

American poets took the appearance of “the Good and Great” for granted and behaved as if the hour for “epic Rage” had already arrived, not noticing the confusion of genres. Nor did they distinguish too neatly between history and nature. Hans Galinsky's Naturae Cursus: Der Weg einer antiken kosmologischen Metapher von der Alten in die Neue Welt suggests that the founding fathers' reliance on “the Laws of Nature” and on “Nature's God” (109 et passim) was more than metaphorical. H. M. Jones's flippant remark that “it soon appeared that the arts and sciences were to descend from heaven, not emigrate from Europe” (34) is pertinent. Ages of neglect of early American literature, or its reduction to the few belletristic works deemed worthy of the modern reader, led to “glittering generalities”, as if we had to repeat the American enlightenment instead of understanding it.

Notwithstanding the cosmopolitanism mentioned by Silverman, the translatio concept itself lent itself to an ethnic bias. Many Americans relied on the translatio imperii ad Teutonicos, a glory reserved not for a generalized West but for an Anglo-Saxon empire (Cf. Samuel Kliger 73, 101, et passim). Freneau was fairly cosmopolitan, but even a contemporary reviewer found it necessary to apologize for Brackenridge's most famous ethnic in Modern Chivalry: “We are inclined to suppose, that Teague was not intended as an example of the true Irish character, but merely as a gross caricature …” (anon. reviewer, The Monthly Anthology 1808:504).

Generalized concepts, even if generally or comparatively true, will not be helpful in understanding the literary careers of our two authors. A famous case is R. Hofstadter's view that anti-intellectualism, “the relationship between intellect and power”, was not a problem in early national American history. “The leaders were the intellectuals. Advanced though the nation was in the development of democracy, the control of its affairs still rested largely in a patrician elite: and within this elite men of intellect moved freely and spoke with enviable authority …” (145). Nor will the contrasting concept of alienation cover all cases equally well. L. P. Simpson takes as his point of departure

the radical displacement of the traditional community centered in Church and State, and in hierarchy, custom, and ritual, as the model of mind in America by the creation of public mind or public opinion as the model of society.

(23-4)

Citizens of the “Third Realm” or “Republic of Letters” were sensitive to the deficiencies of the new republic:

Freneau, Brackenridge, and Brown not only suggest in their writings that in the disparity between the golden intention of the Revolution—the establishment of a state based on rational, lettered mind—and the equivocal motivation of this purpose in the passions, there is a loss of literary authority.

(30)

This is certainly an important cue. Equally noteworthy is Simpson's summing up of one career: “A minor poet of the Great Critique, an active citizen of the Third Realm, Freneau felt abandoned in a historical situation that he had at once resisted and helped to make” (34). Whence the loss of literary authority?

One possibly minor but still symptomatic point concerns the revision of texts under political pressure. It may be deemed harmless that Freneau made Braddock and Johnson disappear to make room for Washington when he wrote his own version of “The Rising Glory of America” in 1786, but the substitution of a neutral expression for “that inglorious race / False Gallia's sons” is a bit worse. With his usual sensitivity to politics, V. L. Parrington remarked that “the changed circumstances played havoc with the colonial text” (1:373). Freneau, in other words, was a poet and a polemicist, alternatively or even at one and the same time.

Simpson senses in Freneau an early pessimism, a “lifelong suspicion that rationality is not an inherent human capacity—that actually the monster who is the king is born out of the monster in man” (32). On the other hand, Freneau kept ‘kingship’ as a symbol of evil; there is less development in his political thinking than is the case with Brackenridge. The relationship between Weltanschauung and experience is an issue here. A short look at the most dangerous political crises of our two authors in the early 1790's should be helpful.

III

After their student years at Princeton and a common venture in school teaching, Brackenridge and Freneau sought America's two frontiers, the West and the sea. They also became part of the developing first party system and came into collision with the strong Federalist power structure, personified in Alexander Hamilton. Brackenridge's legislative stance between the “poor farmers” in the “rural areas around Pittsburgh” and “the monied elite of the town” (Harrison, ed., Princetonians 142) and his even more uncomfortable position during the Whiskey Rebellion, with the Federal Government on one side and the Democratic Societies, “to be held officially responsible for formenting the Whiskey insurrection” (Miller 324) on the other, is as well known as Freneau's involvement with Madison, Jefferson and the National Gazette of Philadelphia. L. Leary has given us the (partly hilarious) story, with copious quotations from both sides, in chapter 8 of That Rascal Freneau.

Defenses of Brackenridge and Freneau in their respective positions usually ran along lines of personal integrity. Brackenridge as an insurgent and Freneau as a man drawing a salary from but viciously attacking a government which fed him, even perjuring himself when he denied facts,—such horror visions of Federalist propaganda and (especially in Freneau's case) lasting legend were laid to rest by patient research. Less clear is the result of these experiences for the literary careers of Brackenridge and Freneau.

In 1779 Brackenridge introduced his United States Magazine (Philadelphia) by stressing what he later denied in Modern Chivalry:

We regard it as our great happiness in these United States that the path to office and preferment lies open to every individual. The mechanic of the city or the husbandman who plows his farm by the river bank has it in his power to become, one day, the first magistrate of his respective commonwealth or to fill a seat in the Continental Congress.

(Brackenridge Reader 71)

But his very disappointments and realignments were grist for the mill of his magnum opus. Simpson makes the interesting point that “the comprehensive theme” of Modern Chivalry “is the problematical role of the man of letters in a society which, shaping itself in the protean image of public mind or public opinion, is incapable of defining its aims or recognizing its motives” (35). True, but Modern Chivalry is also the mirror and the result of a pragmatic readjustment. After having experienced the implications of his own unfortunate metaphor, “the gale of popularity”, Brackenridge proceeded to rely on two American pillars: the law as a career and humor as a literary mode. Freneau, less pragmatic, less humorous, more ideological and more poetic, more in danger of remaining ephemeral from his topical political verse and his fine but fugitive nature poems, “fair flower[s]”, but “hid in … silent, dull retreat” (“The Wild Honey Suckle,” Miscellaneous Works: 152), had a harder time. As an acute observer put it:

Freneau's ultimate perplexity was to discover how an artist should function in a predominantly political culture. America, even as a very young nation, had had a long tradition of republicanism and capitalism. But the question of a literary tradition was still quite disheartening.

(Cowan: 226)

Historians defending Freneau's personal integrity against Federalist aspersions, especially S. E. Forman and Philip Marsh, likewise defended Jefferson and Madison, his political bosses. Not only was Freneau offered a political post by Jefferson; the ex-president even subscribed “for ten volumes” of Freneau's Poems (1809), writing to the author: “Under the shade of a tree one of your volumes will be a pleasant pocket companion” (Forman: 89). Under which tree? Monticello, Virginia, and Mount Pleasant, New Jersey, were very different places, and Cowan is right in pointing out that Freneau “proclaimed the inherent incompatibility of wealth and republicanism …” (231). This was not the American idea.

The strained exchange of letters between poet and ex-president has been available in print since 1901 (cf. Austin: 198-9), but Axelrad has a story (though rather poorly documented) to the effect that Jefferson had subscribed to two copies only and “replied less pleasantly to the Bailey widow when, in an excess of pressure salesmanship, she sent him ten sets instead of two. The other eight he promptly returned to her with a curt note resenting her presumption” (370). The specialist for the Madison-Jefferson-Monroe-Freneau relation (eight articles between 1936 and 1947), Philip Marsh, in a book published the same year as Axelrad's, merely says: “The subscriber list began impressively, with names of the President and the ‘ex’, Jefferson” (303).²

Whether ten or two copies: Jefferson's support of Freneau in 1809 could not be described as “enthusiastic cooperation”, words used for his interest in bringing Freneau to Philadelphia as editor of the National Gazette (Cunningham: 18). Even Philip Marsh posits a possible divergence of views:

Very likely, in 1801, Freneau could have had a profitable sinecure in the new city of Washington. But neither Jefferson nor Madison, who had been his college roommate, really understood the poet or his persistent, lonely search for beauty, for an idealistic dream world that would never let him be content with less than the life of a free soul. And so Philip Freneau, first genuine American poet, returned to his first loves, poetry and the sea—to find, to his dismay, that he had lost much of his genius in the searing satires of the battle for Jefferson and republicanism.

(Marsh, “Jefferson and Freneau”: 209)

The case would not be worth discussion but for the fact that Jefferson, withstanding Washington's pressure to dismiss “that rascal Freneau”, had written in his Anas that Freneau's National Gazette “has saved our constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy, & has been checked by no one means so powerfully as by that paper” (quoted from Marsh, 208). The question, as of 1809, could be put this way: does it pay, or how much does it pay, to save the Constitution?

IV

In Axelrad's darker version of the relation, the collective labors of Republican politicians and journalists, when ready for the harvest, showed Jefferson and Madison as garnering the fruit “while Freneau never savored even the taste of it. He remained, as he always had been, one of the people—‘one of the swinish multitude’—who reached for fruit that forever eluded his grasp” (393). Again it is necessary to distinguish: which “swinish multitude”? Middle-class Freneau, by his patrimony not exactly proletarian, could well invent “Robert Slender, O.S.M.”, because he never was in the least danger of being mixed up with them. On the other hand, he himself contributed to the “bard-baiting clime” of which he complained—as exemplified by his funny “On Epic Poetry” (The Prose of Philip Freneau: 265-5, with 526-7). His attacks on literary and political enemies were mostly violent. Of course, he was simply part of the contemporary scene, “for the political battles of the 1790s were grounded upon a complete distrust of the motives and integrity, the honesty and intentions of one's political opponents” (Howe: 149). When John Adams reproached Jefferson with being “fast asleep in philosophical Tranquility, when ten thousand People, and perhaps many more, were parading the Streets of Philadelphia, on the Evening of my Fast Day”, when he rhetorically asked, “What think you of Terrorism, Mr. Jefferson?” and began to enumerate people offensive to himself, Freneau was high on Adams's list, along with Tom Paine (Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:347). It was more difficult for Freneau than for Witherspoon to avoid such classifications, not only because they partly fitted him, but because as a mere writer he was still not automatically Somebody. Hofstadter's truth about leaders and intellectuals was only a partial truth; there were intellectuals who were not leaders. They could not possibly help having second thoughts about the results of the American Revolution.

With characteristic hyperbole and the quibbling of a polemicist, Freneau had written “On the Ingratitude of Republics” on August 29, 1795, that “For one instance in history where a real republic can be fairly impeached of ingratitude I will venture to produce five hundred wherein the two other forms have outraged ingratitude itself, and even carried it to a degree of diabolicism” (The Prose: 346-8 with 556-7). Real republics are never ungrateful, by definition, but was there a real republic in 1809, when Jefferson withdrew from the White House to Monticello, Madison succeeded him in the presidency, Freneau tried to get together his subscriptions and Tom Paine, who had saved the revolution in 1775, died a pauper and an alcoholic?

Freneau's loyalty to the Founding Fathers was unbroken. In his Collection of Poems on American Affairs … (1815) we find “Stanzas to the Memory of Gen. Washington …” (1:154-6 and 156-8), although supplemented by “Stanzas Occasioned by certain absurd, extravagant, and even blasphemous panegyrics and encomiums on the character of the late gen. Washington …” (1:158-61); also, more piquantly, “Lines Addressed to Mr. Jefferson, On his retirement from the presidency of the United States.—1809” (2:24-27), immediately followed by “Stanzas On the Decease of Thomas Paine …” (2:28-9). Freneau vented his rage on the British, who were once again made responsible for Republican malaise in his undistinguished stanzas on Jefferson, whereas the shorter poem on Paine has more bite and relevance:

Princes and kings decay and die
          And, instant, rise again:
But this is not the case, trust me,
          With men like Thomas Paine.
In vain the democratic host,
          His equal would attain:
For years to come they will not boast
          A second Thomas Paine.

(Collection of Poems 2:28)

While Brackenridge had been busy making the word “democratic” honorific and hence more meaningless, Freneau distinguished between “the democratic host” and a man such as Paine. At first sight it might seem preposterous to believe that Paine's opponent Edmund Burke should also have something to do with Freneau, but his famous complaint is Burkean avant la lettre:

On these bleak climes by Fortune thrown
Where rigid reason reigns, alone,
Where mimic fancy holds no sway
Nor golden forms around her play,
Nor Nature takes her magic hue—
Alas, what has the Muse to do!
An age employ'd in pointing steel
Can no poetic raptures feel;
No fabled Love's enchanting power,
Nor tale of Flora's painted bower,
Nor woodland haunt, or murmuring grove,
Can their prosaic bosoms move.

(“An Author's Soliloquy,” The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau [1788]:171)

V

The ‘presence’ of Edmund Burke in the early republic, apart from the attacks following the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France, must have been formidable, although one would not guess this from the two dozen or so books and articles dealing with Modern Chivalry. Brackenridge's experiences with frontier democracy began before the publication of the Reflections, but Burke's dictum that “Every thing ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man” (139) had received its validation for Brackenridge before it was written down. Dieter Schulz seems to have been the first to point out: “Mit Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) wurde die bis dahin mehr akademische, auf einen Spezialistenkreis beschränkte Diskussion der chivalry zu einem Politikum ersten Ranges” (89).

Chivalry and the accessibility of jobs are not the same matter at all. But both issues were relevant for the writers of the early republic. Neither violent attacks on Burke by American Republicans nor Burke's bland posing as a disinterested philosopher should make us blind to his importance within the developing party system. Reading the Reflections, we get the impression that there was one good, or at least necessary, revolution, the Glorious one, and, a hundred years later, the bad one. The American Revolution somehow did not figure in Burke's scheme of things. His point was clear enough; his principles were so antagonistic to the sentiments voiced in the Declaration of Independence that no self-respecting American republican could tolerate them. The opposition to Burke reached from Tom Paine to Robert Treat Paine, the Federalist poet who, in a Harvard Commencement poem of July 25, 1792, wished that

The fame of Burke in dark oblivion rust,
His pen a meteor—and his page the dust

(Works in Verse and Prose: 77),

a sentiment he came to regret. But how could Freneau in his opposition to Hamilton and the infamous funding system fail to be moved by Burke's attacks on the new money jobbers (attacks unfortunately based on traditional Christian anti-semitism):

The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a nation of gamesters is this; that tho' all are forced to play, few can understand the game; and fewer still are in a condition to avail themselves of the knowledge. The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations.

(311)

There was a fourth area of Burkean relevance. American intellectuals could not help recognizing either themselves or their friends or their enemies in Burke's description of the “new men”, “the political men of letters” (211). Nor should we suppose them innocently unaware of what might be called the Burkean ‘bribe’ offered to intellectuals by the rottenboroughs system: political preferment without tedious democratic processes. Under the heading “Jobs for the Honest Necessitous”, Carl B. Cone has described the system and how it worked for Burke himself. This is not done in a spirit of enmity, but merely to restore the balance:

To posterity, Burke has been the writer of political tracts, the parliamentary orator, the brains of the Rockingham party, and the political philosopher. In addition to being these persons, Burke was the practical politician who undertook the management of votes and men, the party secretary who was concerned with an infinite variety of details, and even the party hack.

(Cone: 74)

Western Pennsylvanian voters and their predilection for “Traddle the Weaver” over a Princeton graduate were not the only problem of early American democracy. Nor was Brackenridge unduly discouraged. Mentioning Paine, but replying to Burke, he wrote:

Democracy embraces the idea of a standing on virtue alone; unaided by wealth or the power of family. This makes “the noble of nature” of whom Thomas Payne speaks. Shall this noble not know his nobility, and be behind the noble of aristocracy who piques himself upon his honour, and feels a stain upon his delicacy as he would a bodily wound? The democrat is the true chevalier, who, though he wears not crosses, or the emblazoned arms of heraldry, yet is ready to do right, and justice to every one. All others are imposters, and do not belong to the order of democracy.

(404, also 521)

Not underestimating the power of words over the minds of men, Brackenridge gave the epithet ‘democratic’ a honorific turn:

The term democrat, has ceased to be a stigma; and begins to be assumed by our public writers, and claimed by our patriots, as characteristic of a good citizen. That of republican, which alone had been vented on for some time, is now considered cold, and equivocal, and has given way, pretty generally, to that of democratic republican. In a short time, it will be simply, the democracy, and a democrat.

(530)

Yet he defined ‘democracy’ in a way that fitted into the new order: “But it is the rage of mere democracy that has brought reproach upon republicks; democratic power unbalanced, is but the despotism of many instead of one. It is the balancing with stays and braces of distributed powers that gives safety” (740). What makes Modern Chivalry still readable is not its political philosophy foreshadowing Tocqueville, but its author's involved irony. Reading it through the spectacles of Melville's The Confidence-Man, we have learned to appreciate its sophistication. Although we cannot forget Samuel Butler's Hudibras, nor Fielding's comedy Don Quixote in England, nor Cervantes, H. Breinig is right in remarking that

Die Form der quixotischen Queste von Ritter und Knecht sowie die Texthinweise auf Cervantes und seinen Roman funktionieren eher als Falle. Farrago ist belesen und in gewissem Maß auch idealistisch, aber immer wieder macht gerade er den Eindruck eines Pragmatikers. Teague dagegen läßt alle positiven Eigenschaften Sancho Panzas vermissen. Und wenn in Modern Chivalry jemand verrückt ist, so ist es die Gesellschaft und nicht der Außenseiter: mit gutem Grund verwahrt sich Farrago immer wieder dagegen, mit Quixote identifiziert zu werden, und der “madman”, der im ersten Band von Teil II aufgrund der öffentlichen Meinung ins Irrenhaus gebracht werden soll, erweist sich als der Vernünftigste von allen.

(101)

The age of chivalry was gone, according to Burke, but Brackenridge still saw room for modern chivalry in a democratic society. Freneau's stance was more elegiac, he never quite retreated from the position voiced in “On the Ingratitude of Republics”:

Has ingratitude been shewn to the old American Army? Who were the ingrates? not the people certainly, for it was their wish that every soldier should be honestly paid his twenty shillings in the pound, or so secured to him, that his dues might be one day received by him or his posterity. The ingratitude of the matter cannot be charged to the Great American Republic, but to the scheming, long-headed authors of funding systems, &c. those little cunning gods, who even at that period began to contemplate putting their base hoofs upon the neck of a free nation, by means of collecting exorbitant wealth (the just dues of the war-worn soldier) into the hands of a few designing, avaricious, and aspiring men.

(Prose Works: 347-8)

Brackenridge's and Freneau's political attitudes were as different as their tempers, their social origins, their experiences and their careers. They were not so much contradictory as complementary: Brackenridge specialized in the contention that the lower classes are fools, Freneau in the persuasion that the upper classes are knaves. Both mustered up enough faith for survival—their own survival and that of democracy, such as it is. But we must not be surprised that their moods were as often catatonic as Catonic. Both regretted not to have found an environment more favorable to their literary ambitions, Freneau for once committing cultural high treason by writing:

A poet where there is no king
Is but a disregarded thing
…

(“The City Poet,” Last Poems: 31),

while Brackenridge complained:

Hard fate to be so rudely torn
By poverty and need of change,
Away to this a foreign range, …
Oh give me Burns; oh give me Scott;
I want no more when these I've got,
To make a rock of any sea
Immortal by such minstrelsy.
…

(A. Weber; 274-5)

Such were the problems of translatio studii. Brackenridge admitted to having “committed an error in going to a new country, and regretted not having remained in the city” (quoted from Newlin:275). Freneau, along with Tom Paine, probably had more to regret. He could not have found the literary and political climate after the turn of the century very congenial. The American Revolution had created a new ruling class (or rather several), leaving to radical intellectuals the choice of accommodating themselves as best they could or dying in the literary doghouse.

Notes

1. The only readily available text of A Poem, on “The Rising Glory of America” (1772) is in Fred Lewis Pattee's edition of The Poems of Philip Freneau. Poet of the American Revolution. Edited for the Princeton Historical Association by—(New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1:49-83. On page 61, after the line “Secure from tyranny and hateful man”, the line “For this they left their country and their friends” should be inserted according to Smeall: 266 n. 11. For all other poems by Freneau, facsimile editions have been used because of the unreliability of Pattee's three-volume edition.

2. The affair is unlikely ever to be cleared up, as the documentary evidence is incomplete. See The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 20, Julian P. Boyd, ed. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), p. 752 n. 97: Jefferson's name was entered for ten copies, but not in his handwriting. “Some person wanting principle must have taken the unwarrantable liberty”, wrote Lydia Bailey as publisher to Jefferson (8 May 1810). “At her suggestion, TJ returned all save the set he had ordered (TJ to Lydia Bailey, 6 Dec. 1810). The implication is that the person wanting principle who had thus padded the order was the author, certainly not the publisher.”—See also The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, Vol. 1, Robert A. Rutland et al., eds. (Charlottesville: U. of Virginia Press, 1984), p. 106, p. 156 (letter from Madison to Freneau not found), pp. 181-2 and p. 319.

Works Cited

The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Vol. 2, 1812-1826. Ed. By Lester J. Cappon. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Andrews, William D. “Philip Freneau and Francis Hopkinson.” In Everett Emerson, ed. American Literature, 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1977, 127-144.

Austin, Mary S. Philip Freneau: The Poet of the Revolution: A History of His Life and Times. Ed. by Helen Kearny Vreeland. New York: A Wessels Company, 1901; rpt. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1968.

Axelrad, Jacob. Philip Freneau: Champion of Democracy. Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1967.

Bell, Michael D., ed. Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Berkeley, George. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Vol. 7. Ed. by A. A. Luce. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1955.

Brackenridge, Hugh Henry. Modern Chivalry. Ed. by Claude M. Newlin. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1962.

Breinig, Helmbrecht. Satire und Roman: Studien zur Theorie des Genrekonflikts und zur satirischen Erzählliteratur der USA von Brackenridge bis Vonnegut. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. Ed. by Conor Cruise O'Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.

Butterfield, L. H. John Witherspoon Comes to America: A Documentary Account Based Largely on New Materials. Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1953.

Collins, Varnum Lansing. President Witherspoon: A Biography. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925.

Cone, Carl B. Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957.

Cowan, Thomas D. “Philip Freneau: The Artist in the Early Republic.” New Jersey History 92, 4 (1974):225-239.

Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789-1801. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Duyckinck, Evert A., introd. Poems Relating to the American Revolution. By Philip Freneau. New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1865.

Forman, S.E. The Political Activities of Philip Freneau. Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. 20, Nos. 9-10. Baltimore, 1902.

Freneau, Philip. Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects. Introd. by Harry Hayden Clark. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976.

———, The Poems (1786) and Miscellaneous Works (1788) of Philip Freneau. Ed. by Lewis Leary. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975.

———, Poems Written Between the Years 1768 & 1794. Introd. by Lewis Leary. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976.

———, Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War. 1809 Introd. by Lewis Leary. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976.

———, A Collection of Poems on American Affairs and a Variety of Other Subjects Chiefly Moral and Political (1815). Introd. by Lewis Leary. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976.

———, The Last Poems of Philip Freneau. Ed. by Lewis Leary. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1945.

———, The Prose of Philip Freneau. Ed. by Philip M. Marsh. New Brunswick, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1955.

Galinsky, Hans. Naturae Cursus: Der Weg einer antiken kosmologischen Metapher von der Alten in die Neue Welt. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1968.

Harrison, Richard A., ed. Princetonians, 1769-1775: A Biographical Dictionary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

Howe, John R., Jr. “Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s.” American Quarterly 19, 2 Pt. 1 (1967):147-165.

Jones, Howard Mumford. The Theory of American Literature. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1948.

Kliger, Samuel. “The Gothic Revival and the German Translatio.” Modern Philology 45, 2 (1947):73-103.

Leary, Lewis. That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure. New York: Octagon Books, 1964.

Marder, Daniel, ed. A Hugh Henry Brackenridge Reader, 1770-1815. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

Marsh, Philip. “Jefferson and Freneau.” American Scholar 16, 2 (1947): 201-210.

———, Philip Freneau: Poet and Journalist. Minneapolis, Minn.: Dillon Press, 1967.

Mathews, M. M., ed. The Beginnings of American English. Chicago: Phoenix Books—The University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Miller, William. “The Democratic Societies and the Whiskey Insurrection.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 62 (1938):324-349.

Rev. of Modern Chivalry. The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review 5 (Sept. 1808):498-508 and (Oct. 1808):554-558.

Newlin, Claude Milton. The Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932.

Nye, Russel Blaine. 1776-1830. The Cultural Life of the New Nation. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Paine, Robert Treat. The Works, in Verse and Prose, of the Late Robert Treat Paine, Jun. Esq. With Notes. Boston: J. Belcher, 1812.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920. Vol. 1, “1620-1800: The Colonial Mind.” New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958.

Schulz, Dieter. Suche und Abenteuer: Die “Quest” in der englischen und amerikanischen Erzählkunst der Romantik. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981.

Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the American Revolution. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976.

Simpson, Lewis P. The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Smeall, J. F. W. “The Respective Roles of Hugh Brackenridge and Philip Freneau in Composing The Rising Glory of America.” PBSA [Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America] 67 (1973): 263-281.

Spiller, Robert E., ed. The American Literary Revolution, 1783-1837. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books—Doubleday & Company, 1967.

Tichi, Cecelia. New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Weber, Alfred. “Hugh Brackenridges Epistel an Sir Walter Scott.” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 8 (1963):267-279.

Wood, Gordon S., ed. The Rising Glory of America, 1760-1820. New York: George Braziller, 1971.