Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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not this suggestion was accurate, in casting the “Parody” in this way, Edes and Gill transformed the song’s meaning once again, turning the throng of voices ostensibly undisturbed by the Townshend duties into a small cadre of occupying soldiers. In this new context, the song’s treatment of the Sons of Liberty appears as an example of British condescension toward colonial Americans. (This insinuation may have struck a nerve among the soldiers in the garrison, because in the same issue of the Gazette in which the song appears, one Henry Hulton wrote to the editors from Castle William, formally disavowing authorship of the song.)41 Thus, even as the parody’s own lyrics project the dynamic of the conflict as one of opposing parties within the colonies, the context surrounding its publication in the Gazette undercuts this claim and reasserts a version of the original binary opposition projected by “The Liberty Song,” with “the people” on one side and the occupying army on the other.
Perhaps inspired by the subtlety of this maneuver to negate the ideological force of the “Parody,” another song, “The Parody Parodized,” appeared in the Gazette the following week. As with the “Parody,” the “Parody Parodized” took aim at the rival chorus projected by its immediate precursor, portraying this chorus as an insignificant “Tory” minority: “COME swallow your Bumpers, ye Tories! and roar, / That the sons of fair FREEDOM are hamper’d once more.” Against this sentiment, not surprisingly, the “sons of fair FREEDOM” repeat many of the assertions of Dickinson’s original—that their spirits will not be hampered by “Cut-throats” or “Oppressors” and that they will gladly risk their lives to defend their liberty. The function of “The Parody Parodized” is to wrest from its predecessor any claim to represent the voice of the people, and then to assert the same claim through the performance of the song: “Then join hand in hand, brave AMERICANS all, / To be free, is to live; to be slaves is to fall; / … / … / … / In Freedom we’re born, and, like SONS of the brave, /Will never surrender, /But swear to defend her, / And scorn to survive, if unable to save.”42
Though “The Liberty Song” was probably the most popular example of literary resistance to the Townshend Acts, it was far from the only one. Another well-known poem of protest—composed, coincidentally, by John Dickinson’s cousin by marriage, Hannah Griffits—was “The Female Patriots,” which is remembered today as one of relatively few works of political verse published by a woman during the entire Revolutionary period. And indeed, its unique contribution to the resistance movement originates from its character as a self-consciously gendered poem. First and foremost, “The Female Patriots” insists that women play a vital role in the movement because their otherwise limited power over domestic matters gives them considerable input over whether or not to support a boycott against tea, sugar, or imported fabrics. Beyond this, as the title suggests, the poem is important for its introduction into pre-Revolutionary culture another symbolic embodiment of the vox populi ideal—the female patriot, who speaks back not only to the administration in Britain but also to American men whose own commitment to the boycott may be less than resolute. This latter function is suggested most immediately by the poem’s subtitle, which states that it is “Addressed to the Daughters of Liberty in America”—a phrase implying quasi-official status, as if the poem’s primary audience is a sort of organized political body, a female counterpart to the Sons of Liberty. The poem as a whole likewise functions as a call to action, arising from a stated deficiency of determination among those in power—men who “from Party, or Fear of a Frown” have been kept “quietly down, / Supinely asleep—and depriv’d of their Sight.” If these “degenerate” sons refuse to guard the rights and freedom of colonial Americans, the speaker exclaims, “Let the Daughters of Liberty nobly arise.”43
The paradox surrounding this act of voicing female patriotism is that, as the speaker also acknowledges, when it comes to deciding how to respond to the Townshend duties, “we’ve no Voice but a Negative here”—for the political agency of women arises only from their power to “forbear” from consuming “Taxables” like tea, glass, and paint. Yet it is precisely the marginalization of the female patriots from power that allows them—as we also saw in the case of the humble newsboys—to lay claim to more accurately representing the people at large. By emphasizing women’s power of forbearance, moreover, the speaker is also able to assert the traditionally “masculine” ideal of republican virtue, that of sacrificing one’s personal self-interest for the public good and eschewing what was frequently described in protest pamphlets as an “effeminate” desire for luxury. As Griffits’s speaker argues, by living according to these republican values, even within the confines of the domestic sphere, female patriots possess a powerful retort to certain male counterparts who, either out of weakness or self-interest, seek to silence women’s protests: “Thus acting—we point out their Duty to Men; / And should the Bound-Pensioners tell us to hush, / We can throw back the Satire, by bidding them blush.”44
No doubt inspired by Griffits’s poem, the iconic figure of the female patriot—whose fidelity to the resistance movement was measured by her willingness to deny herself such luxuries as tea and fine linen—would become a subject of frequent poetic musings throughout the period of the Townshend Acts crisis. Appearing several months after Griffits’s “Female Patriots” was the similarly entitled anonymous broadside The Female Patriot, No. 1—which, in contrast to Griffits’s address to the Daughters of Liberty, is addressed “To the Tea-Drinking Ladies of New York.” In place of Griffits’s call for female solidarity as a corrective to male wavering, moreover, this poem directs its satire toward women, presenting them as obstacles to their husbands’ efforts to honor the boycott: thus, in response to her husband’s refusal to participate in the importation of tea, the shrewish wife depicted in the poem beats him with her broomstick, exclaiming, “Go, dirty CLOD-POLE! get me some Shushong, / This Evening I’ve invited MADAM STRONG.”45
However misogynistic in its satire, The Female Patriot, No. 1, raised questions about women’s involvement in the boycott that would be taken up as a crucial motif in political verse written by women during the crisis. Griffits herself would in 1775 pen a fictional poetic exchange pitting “Fidelia,” who calls on women to join her in boycotting East India Company tea, against “Europa,” a clearly satirized figure who curses the “hideous wild uproar” brought on by Congress’s nonimportation pact and declares, “Tea I must have, or I shall dye.” In the same vein, Mercy Otis Warren would publish several poems on the tea boycott, including a satire against women who complain about having to give up what they call “necessities” but what the poem’s voice of moral conscience derides as “useless vanities of life.”46 As in the implied back-and-forth exchange between the conflicting “Female Patriot” poems, these poems and groups of poems followed a binary structure in which a satirized voice—one who complains about the inconvenience of political action—is opposed by that of a self-proclaimed patriot. By consistently favoring the latter argument, such poems allowed complaints about the boycott to be aired but then circumscribed within a moral framework that served to police illicit consumption of taxable goods at a moment when the political leverage of the resistance depended largely on the success of the boycotts.
In all of these examples, poetry and song gave voice to the resistance to the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, and it did so according to what I have described as a poetics of resistance—a set of literary practices and conventions that arose in response to the circumstances of the crises themselves. The first of these—seen in the newsboy verses and then in the “Liberty Song” and “The Female Patriot”—is the consistent act of connecting the poetic voice to the voice of the people. This would continue as a mainstay of poetic warfare in the ensuing decades, with poems and songs giving voice to these and other symbolic manifestations of the vox populi. In positive or concrete form, the voice of the people would be represented by a variety of symbolic figures speaking back to various institutions of authority, from the humble soldier asking for a fairer system of compensation for Revolutionary War veterans in the 1790s to the “honest tar” of 1807 who rails against the embargo as an impractical policy dreamed up by elite politicians. At the same time, as seen in the versification vogue, the voice of the people could also be expressed in a purely negative or critical mode, as the invisible agent that draws on the transformative power of parody to register the public’s