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Charles Lamb (search for this): chapter 4
herefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many watchings. Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American adventure — which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled What is an American--was ending tragically in civil war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the nineteenth. A man unlettered, said Whittier, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language. Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends. The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, Poet of t
Edward Channing (search for this): chapter 4
et the change. My heart sometimes seems tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed with so many watchings. Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American adventure — which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled What is an American--was ending tragically in civil war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose Journal, praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the nineteenth. A man unlettered, said Whittier, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language. Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends. The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, Poet of the American Rev
Odell (search for this): chapter 4
ng sentence gives the keynote of much of the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson. We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the Loyalist or Tory pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called our sovereign Lord the Mob. They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weight
Tom Paine (search for this): chapter 4
have little in common with the Revolutionary literature which we have been considering. The reasoning is close, the style vigorous but neither warmed by passion nor colored by the individual emotions of the author. The Federalist remains a classic example of the civic quality of our post-Revolutionary American political writing, broadly social in its outlook, well informed as to the past, confident — but not reckless — of the future. Many Americans still read it who would be shocked by Tom Paine and bored with Edmund Burke. It has none of the literary genius of either of those writers, but its formative influence upon successive generations of political thinking has been steadying and sound. In fact, our citizen literature cannot be understood aright if one fails to observe that its effect has often turned, not upon mere verbal skill, but upon the weight of character behind the words. Thus the grave and reserved George Washington says of the Constitution of 1787: Let us raise
Galloway (search for this): chapter 4
of much of the Revolutionary writing that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson. We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost Cause, the Loyalist or Tory pleadings for allegiance to Britain. It was written by able and honest men, like Boucher and Odell, Seabury, Leonard and Galloway. They distrusted what Seabury called our sovereign Lord the Mob. They represented, in John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the people of the colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was too low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority. In all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative, the prosperous, the well-educated, with a mixture, of course, of mere placemen and tuft-hunters. They composed weighty pamphlets, eloquent sermons,
Charles Lee (search for this): chapter 4
emain in a State of Nature as long as they please. . . When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary consent. Jean-Jacques himself could not be more bland, nor at heart more fiercely demagogic. Tom Paine would have been no match for Sam Adams in a town-meeting, but he was an even greater pamphleteer. He had arrived from England in 1774, at the age of thirty-eight, having hitherto failed in most of his endeavors for a livelihood. Rebellious Staymaker; unkempt, says Carlyle; but General Charles Lee noted that there was genius in his eyes, and he bore a letter of introduction from Franklin commending him as an ingenious, worthy young man, which obtained for him a position on the Pennsylvania magazine. Before he had been a year on American soil, Paine was writing the most famous pamphlet of our political literature, Common sense, which appeared in January, 1776. A style hitherto unknown on this side of the Atlantic, wrote Edmund Randolph. Yet this style of familiar talk to the
John Jay (search for this): chapter 4
k City in 1774 and with The farmer refuted, a reply to Samuel Seabury's Westchester farmer. They were continued in extraordinary letters, written during Hamilton's military career, upon the defects of the Articles of Confederation and of the finances of the Confederation. Hamilton contributed but little to the actual structure of the new Constitution, but as a debater he fought magnificently and triumphantly for its adoption by the Convention of the State of New York in 1788. Together with Jay and Madison he defended the fundamental principles of the Federal Union in the remarkable series of papers known as the Federalist. These eighty-five papers, appearing over the signature Publius in two New York newspapers between October, 1787, and April, 1788, owed their conception largely to Hamilton, who wrote more than half of them himself. In manner they are not unlike the substantial Whig literature of England, and in political theory they have little in common with the Revolutionary
Collins (search for this): chapter 4
. But our Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet. The prose-men, such as Jefferson, rose nearer the height of the great argument than did the men of rhyme. Here and there the struggle inspired a brisk ballad like Francis Hopkinson's Battle of the Kegs, a Hudibrastic satire like Trumbull's McFingal, or a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's Columbia. Freneau painted from his own experience the horrors of the British prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There was patriotic verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary value is slight, and it reveals few moods of the American mind that are not more perfectly conveyed through oratory, the pamphlet, and the political essay. The immediate models of this Revolutionary verse were the minor British bards of the eighteenth century, a century greatly given to verse-writing, but endowed by Heaven with the prose-reason mainly. The reader of Bu
Welsh (search for this): chapter 4
his successors in the Presidency, was not a man of the people, but he was a man of such singular insight that he saw that all the roots of generous power come from thepeople. On his father's side Jefferson came from sound yeoman stock, in which Welsh blood ran. His mother was a Virginia Randolph. Born in Albemarle County, near the little mountain --Monticello -where he built a mansion for his bride and where he lies buried, the tall, strong, red-haired, grayeyed, gifted boy was reputed the bse young man, and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan reading and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two years before, into an immortal manifesto to mankind. Its method is th
Rufus Choate (search for this): chapter 4
ge and sweep and enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the opinions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national sentiments and national reasons to a candid world. It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted Americans — and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during the last decades — to minimize the value of Jefferson's self-evident truths. Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at those glittering generalities, and countless college-bred men, some of them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his phrase, all men are created equal, with the subsidiary phrase about governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Editors and congressmen and even college professors have proclaimed themselves unable to assent
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