Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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come in the form of a verse satire entitled “The Word of Congress” by one of the most prolific Loyalist poets of the period, Jonathan Odell. Though not published until 1779, when Odell was living safely in the garrison town of New York and contributing regularly to Rivington’s Royal Gazette, “The Word of Congress” constituted the Loyalist response to the Declaration of Independence as well as to the numerous official directives issued subsequently by the Second Congress, including its blueprint for the new government, the 1778 Articles of Confederation.
Like his Patriot counterparts, Odell takes as his primary target the relationship between power and the printed word. Yet rather than responding in the form of parody, Odell reaches back to the tradition of high-Augustan satire that included Alexander Pope, Edward Young, Charles Churchill, and their American imitators during the Stamp Act crisis. Such poetry is characterized, as we saw in Chapter 1, by expressions of righteous indignation against a world turned upside down, and from Odell’s perspective, the primary feature of this upside-down world is that an upstart assemblage of rebels has produced a series of documents that, far from being ridiculed or ignored, have somehow achieved actual, concrete form in the committees, special courts, and militias, all of which seem to have been called into existence as if out of thin air.
Odell had experienced the real-life effects of the new American government directly and poignantly between 1776 and 1778, when, under surveillance by the local Committee of Public Safety, he fled his home in Burlington, New Jersey, to spend the remainder of the war as a chaplain in British-occupied Philadelphia, and later in New York. Against this backdrop, “The Word of Congress” addresses not only the effrontery of the Congress’s issuing of declarations but also the more inexplicable process by which a declaration issued by an illegitimate body could somehow transform men into officers of a newly formed shadow government with the power to determine the fate of a loyal subject of the Crown. This process—by which mere language is capable of speaking material reality into existence—is the controlling metaphor of the poem, which is presented in the opening lines as a perverse example of the biblical formula “the Word made flesh.” Alluding both to this phrase from the beginning of the book of John and the equally famous verse from Matthew, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” Odell characterizes the Word of Congress as a similarly immaterial reality that has paradoxically become not only substance but also food: “The Word of Congress, like a round of beef, / To hungry Satire gives a sure relief: / No trifling tid-bits to delude the pen; / But solid victuals cut and come again.”15 Yet beyond suggesting a quasi-metaphysical status afforded to the Word of Congress—which remains capitalized, in biblical fashion, for the remainder of the poem—the metaphor also reveals Odell’s desired effect for his poem. If the Word of Congress is “like a round of beef,” Odell’s satiric response amounts to an act of discursive devouring, giving “sure relief” to the indignant satirist, and more important, nullifying Congress’s power to remake the world through linguistic alchemy.
By representing his satire as the discursive antagonist of such texts as the Declaration of Independence, Odell addresses one of the key differences between a royal proclamation and a congressional declaration. Whereas the former issued from a single identifiable speaker—which, as we have seen, opened it up to caricature of a personal sort—the latter was by definition anonymous and collective, the vox populi transposed into print. Against this, Odell’s invocation to Satire personified in the opening lines—recalling earlier invocations by Young, Churchill, and Benjamin Church, pits the anonymous voice of Congress against another, more traditional, anonymous voice of Satire. This is Satire as the voice of a traditional moral order delivering its verdict on a corrupt society and reasserting in its place a stable, unchanging truth. Indeed, as Odell goes on to imply, such a verdict is precisely the opposite of the shifting, “many colour’d” Word of Congress:
Oh! ’tis a Word of pow’r, of prime account,
I’ve seen it like the daring Osprey mount;
I’ve seen it like a dirty reptile creep,
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I’ve seen it softer than the vernal rain,
Mildly descending on the grassy plain—
I’ve heard it pious as a saint in pray’r—
I’ve heard it like an angry trooper swear –
I’ve known it suit itself to ev’ry plan –
I’ve known it lie to God, and lie to Man.16
In describing the Word of Congress as variably gentle or violent, issuing from the mouth of a pious saint or an angry soldier, Odell is speaking once again from personal experience, as someone who found it impossible to reconcile the lofty ideals of the Patriot movement with his own harsh treatment at the hands of provincial authorities. Insofar as the Word is intangible and abstract, he warned, it can be molded into various shapes, suited to “ev’ry plan,” which is why the poet declares at the end of this passage that the Word of Congress is, at bottom, a lie to God as well as man. Yet as he also illustrates throughout, this very intangibility is the paradoxical source of its power, for like a spirit descending from on high, the Word of Congress is capable of effecting countless personal transformations. Thus, for instance, the renowned scientist and inventor David Rittenhouse perceives the Word “sound[ing] in his ears,” listens to its voice “with strange delight,” and sinks from the lofty realms of science to become a “paltry statesman” and “Vice President elect of rogues and fools.” Similar transformations are recounted over the course of the poem, with Odell directing his satire at public officials from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, who, by the power of Congress’s words, have become state Supreme Court justices or members of their committees of safety. This, too, is central to Odell’s strategy: countering the assertion that the new federal and state governments actually represent the voice of the people, Odell goes to considerable lengths to personalize the Patriot movement as an assortment of individuals who can be tangibly described and derided for their specific vices and follies.17
Thus, after presenting over the course of hundreds of lines a rogue’s gallery of prominent Whigs, Odell takes up the question central to the poem’s preoccupation with the transforming power of the “Word.” How did this fledgling colonial resistance, within only a few years, develop not only into a war for independence but also a radical overthrow of the very state apparatuses that had until recently so successfully enacted their authority? For Odell, the answer is found in the evolving rhetoric of the Congress and of the newspapers that reported on its actions. In the beginning, such rhetoric was wholly unlike what it would eventually become: Congress spoke of resisting only the most intolerable acts of Parliament, respectfully petitioned the king for redress, and insisted on the loyalty of its members. But over time, the Word of Congress took on a life of its own, leading the people unwittingly down a serpentine path to what can only be defined as treason:
Whoe’er the word of Congress shall peruse,
In every piece will see it change its views—
Now, swell with duty to the King elate,
Now, melt with kindness to the parent state;
Then back to treason suddenly revolve.
The lines that follow this passage trace a process, importantly, that involves not simply Congress’s textual productions but also those of the Patriot press: “Trace it through all the windings of the press, / Vote or appeal, petition or address, / Trace it in every act; in every speech, / Too sure you’ll find duplicity in each.”18 In this way, the poem treats the dissemination of treasonous ideas via print more broadly as constituting a crucial second stage of political transformation.
The acts of the First Congress, Odell recalls, were unable to gain a large enough following to realize their underlying logic of political independence; yet “Not so discourag’d, the prolific Word / To more successful artifice recurr’d. / Swarms of deceivers, practis’d in the trade, / Were sent abroad to gull, cajole, persuade.” Odell has in mind here Patriot printers such as