Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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For this speaker, the Stamp Act constituted a crucial test of whether one would resist the forces of “slavery” or remain silent; whether a printer or poet passed that test suggested that he could be trusted in the event of the next crisis, which would soon come.26
If the carrier’s address represented a consciously populist mode of poetic resistance, its high literary counterpart might be termed the “satire of the times.” This is a genre that also appeared spontaneously in 1765, in the form of the two lengthiest anti–Stamp Act poems, The Times. A Poem, published anonymously by Boston physician Benjamin Church, and the still-anonymous Oppression. A Poem. By an American. With Notes, by a North Briton. Besides their length, what set these works apart from other Stamp Act verses was the ideological significance communicated through their form; in contrast to the informal and occasional verse tradition to which the newsboy’s addresses belonged, these works consciously announced themselves as part of the Augustan satiric tradition that had reached its apex in 1730s and 1740s Britain in the poetry of Alexander Pope, Edward Young, and others, and which had continued into the 1760s in the works of Charles Churchill. Befitting this tradition, The Times and Oppression: A Poem responded to the Stamp Act crisis in consciously transatlantic or imperial terms, recounting the history of Britain as a narrative of ongoing political corruption and satiric response, first by Pope and Young, and then by Churchill, who also addressed Parliamentary impositions on the liberties of those Britons who represented the political opposition. Within this narrative, the Stamp Act crisis appeared as merely the most recent of such impositions, the latest in a half-century-long history of political abuse.
The extent to which Oppression: A Poem calls to mind a transatlantic literary-political opposition is evident, first and foremost, in the circumstances of its publication. Though the poem’s subtitle identifies the author as “an American,” the poem was first published in London in 1765 before being reprinted the same year in Boston and New York, thus addressing not only outraged Americans but the considerable number of Britons already inclined to sympathize with their American countrymen. A similar point is made in the reference to “Notes, by a North Briton,” which readers would immediately recognize as referring to the Opposition newspaper, the North Briton, published by John Wilkes and edited by Churchill. Throughout its publication in 1762 and 1763, the North Briton had repeatedly charged that the court and Parliament had come under the control of a corrupt cabal of Scots (or North Britons), led by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, who was accused of manipulating the king into imposing policies that opposed the people’s interests. Similarly, the author of Oppression: A Poem singles out Bute and his prime ministerial successor, George Grenville, as masterminds of a twofold assault against true English liberty—the Stamp Act on the one hand and, on the other, Wilkes’s 1763 arrest and expulsion from Parliament for seditious libel—a charge that arose specifically from his publication of the North Briton, No. 45, for which he had become an international symbol of the struggle to defend British liberty against government coercion.27
That the author of Oppression: A Poem understood his work as belonging to a decades-long tradition of satiric resistance is announced as well in the poem’s opening lines. For while the poem directs its satire most explicitly at the Stamp Act, it presents the crisis as part of a problem of government corruption that has plagued Britain since at least the 1720s, and it does so, importantly, through of a series of allusions to several well-known eighteenth-century satires:
WHEN private faith and public trusts are sold,
And traitors barter liberty for gold:
When giant-vice and irreligion rise,
On mountain’d falsehoods to invade the skies:
When fell corruption, dark and deep, like fate,
Saps the foundation of our happy state:
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When tyrants skulk behind a gracious T[hrone],
And practice what,—their courage dare not own;
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When countries groan beneath Oppression’s hand,
And pension’d blockheads riot through the land:
When COLONIES a savage Ex—se pay,
To feed the creatures of a motly [sic] day:
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When all these ills, thousands yet untold,
Destroy our liberty, and rob our gold,
Should not then SATIRE bite with all its rage,
And just resentment glow through ev’ry page?
The most obvious allusion in this passage is to John Brown’s Essay on Satire (1744), a work purporting to teach poets not only the art of effective satire but also, and more important, when in the course of a society’s moral or political decline it becomes necessary to speak back in the acerbic tones of satire. Indeed, the passage from Oppression quotes Brown directly on this question: “When fell corruption, dark and deep, like fate, / Saps the foundation of a sinking state; / … / … / Then warmer numbers glow through satire’s page, / And all her smiles are darken’d into rage.” Implicit in Oppression’s tribute to Brown (as well as in Brown’s tribute in his poem to Pope), is a reminder of the literary warfare simultaneously waged in many of the satiric masterpieces of the 1720s—The Dunciad, Gulliver’s Travels, The Beggar’s Opera—against the Parliamentary dishonesty, bribery, and fraud associated with the government of First Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Embedded in the very name given to this literary period—the Augustan Age—stood the anxious possibility that, if left to itself, political corruption would spread through all segments of society, leading, as in ancient Rome, to the decline and fall of a once virtuous and prosperous society. The purpose of the poem, accordingly, is to intervene in this process of moral or political decline before it reaches the point of no return. Within this narrative, the satirist addresses the reader not (as in the carrier’s address) as a representative voice of the people but as its moral guardian.28
The opening lines of Benjamin Church’s The Times identifies the same transatlantic literary opposition to Bute and Grenville, this time by alluding to the poetry of Charles Churchill, Wilkes’s collaborator who had, in the years immediately prior to the Stamp Act, produced a string of social and political satires (including a poem also entitled The Times). Church opens his own version of The Times with a eulogy to the recently deceased Churchill and a humble comparison of his own “rough” verse to that of his English precursor: “’Tis not great Churchill’s ghost who claims your ear, / For even ghosts of wit are strangers here; / That patriot-soul to other climes remov’d, / Well-pleas’d enjoys that liberty he lov’d.”29 Yet despite this gesture of contrast, the point here and throughout the poem is that Church and Churchill belong to a common satiric alliance, and their poems, appearing at nearly the same moment on opposite sides of the Atlantic, stand as twin defenses of liberty against those who would usurp it for their narrow ends.
This is why both The Times and Oppression: A Poem make the point of emphasizing the ideological union between those who denied Wilkes the freedom to criticize his government and those who advocated excise, whether in Britain or America. Thus Church, writing in America, takes aim not only at Bute and his associates at the center of imperial power but also at men like Jared Ingersoll, a notorious Boston stampman accused of enriching himself at the expense of his countrymen. Similarly, the anonymous “American” author of Oppression, writing from London, devotes a significant part of his poem to attacking one John Huske, a New Hampshire native who returned to England to become a member of Parliament. Huske was commonly accused of being one of the architects of the Stamp Act and in fact was hanged in effigy on the Liberty Tree alongside Lord Grenville on the day the act took effect. This shared sense of literary alliance explains why both The Times and Oppression: A Poem echo the charge first made by Churchill in The Farewell—that this