Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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and writings of ascendant leaders for evidence of political apostasy—or worse, of factious or sinister designs.
By the time the poetry wars of the early republic reached their apex in the 1790s—the period covered in greatest detail in this book, encompassing the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters—poets not only engaged individually with texts and discourses they deemed threatening to the republic but also began to identify with one of the two proto-parties forming around Jefferson and Madison, on one side, and Hamilton and Adams on the other. Defending the policies and rhetoric of Washington’s administration was a large and prolific group of poets, mainly from New England, which included two generations of Hartford Wits (Timothy and Theodore Dwight, Richard Alsop, Lemuel Hopkins, and Elihu Hubbard Smith) and a coterie of like-minded poets, such as Robert Treat Paine, Isaac Story, and Thomas Green Fessenden. Against this throng stood a literary opposition whose numbers were smaller but whose political influence was no less potent, and whose sympathies lay with what Jefferson famously labeled the “Republican interest.” Led by the equally prolific Philip Freneau—who began his career as the most fiery of Revolutionary poets and who came to the nation’s capital at Jefferson’s behest to found the opposition newspaper the National Gazette—this camp also included the apostate Hartford Wit, Joel Barlow, the jurist-poet St. George Tucker of Virginia, and countless lesser-known and anonymous versifiers. This is the period in which poets conceived their efforts most fully as poems in retaliation, responding to the works of other poets by circumscribing them within counternarratives designed to negate their ideological force. By the late 1790s, scarcely could a political debate emerge without also appearing in the form of a corresponding debate in verse, in which individual displays of wit served as grounds for claiming literary triumphs, and literary triumphs, in turn, implied a corresponding political triumph for the side with whom a given poet identified.17
In referring to the 1790s as a period of partisan warfare, I am talking not about fully formed or organized political parties but rather about what historians of the early republic refer to as proto-parties, which formed after the breakdown of the consensus that had helped bring about the creation of the federal government. In addition to reflecting competing regional and economic interests and rival interpretations of the Constitution, these proto-parties reflected conflicting political discourses, as the older language of republican civic virtue came into increasing opposition to an emerging language (identified in particular with the French Revolution) of liberty, equality, and the rights of man. Over the course of the 1790s, the two sides evolved into parties amid a political atmosphere characterized by mutual suspicion and fear, such that partisans came to perceive their rivals’ arguments in decidedly conspiratorial terms—as a cover to restore monarchy or to incite violent Revolution in America—and thus came to view the partisan division as nothing less than a struggle over the fledgling republic’s very survival. Historians have long noted the hyper-partisan rhetoric in the private correspondences of political leaders like Hamilton and Jefferson, but during the 1790s such rhetoric increasingly came to permeate public discourse, largely through the emergence of partisan newspapers and local political associations.18 It is in this context that political poetry would play an outsized role in contributing to this sense of momentous struggle, constructing and projecting symbolic narratives in which even arcane policy matters appeared to contain enormous national implications.
Throughout this period, significantly, poets held onto the early assumption that had sustained the verse wars of the Revolution—specifically, that their works represented the voice of the people and functioned to protect the public interest against various narrow factions believed to be plotting to usurp power. Such a claim is not surprising, perhaps, as a descriptor of poems that circulated on behalf of the opposition Republican (or Democratic-Republican) Party. This body of verse was characterized, first, by an unreserved embrace of the French Revolution and its corresponding language of the rights of man, and by an application of revolutionary rhetoric to the critique of the government formed during Washington’s presidency, which many Republicans believed had come under the control of aristocrats like Adams, or speculators in the employ of Hamilton’s Treasury. Countering these charges, poets writing in support of the administration—who adopted the name Federalist from the original constitutional consensus—engaged the Republican critique at the level of both content and form, employing parody and burlesque to recast the opposition as conspiratorial in their thinking and violent in their rhetoric.19 In engaging in this counterstrategy, Federalist poets (by virtue of their more prolific literary output) initially claimed the mantle of wit for their side, projecting a political identity grounded in rational, moderate urbanity, and portraying their opponents as an irrational and extreme faction.
As we shall also see, the respective combatants in the poetry wars of the 1790s refused to concede any of their opponents’ characterizations. Republicans countered the Federalist claim to superior wit and urbanity by offering their own wry satiric pieces, such as St. George Tucker’s series of ironic panegyrics to leaders of the administration, crediting them with having successfully created a government that was all but unrecognizable to the Madisonians who had originally supported the Constitution. Yet just as Republican wits refused to allow their opponents to brand them as humorless or extreme, Federalists refused to concede the Republicans’ claim to represent the people’s party. Given the Federalists’ well-documented suspicion of populism and Revolutionary rhetoric, their implicit claim to represent the people’s true interests may appear incongruous. Yet Federalist poets infused their works with a series of attacks exposing Republicans leaders as meager embodiments of the vox populi, highlighting their status as wealthy landowners and pedigreed elites whose interests were hardly consistent with those of the small farmers and mechanics for whom they claimed to speak. More significantly, Federalist wits introduced what stands in retrospect as an early version of the critique of nineteenth-century white male populism that has been advanced in our own time—namely, that such populism was accompanied by support for policies favoring the removal of Native tribes from the Western territories and the protection and expansion of the Southern slave economy.
In this tit-for-tat atmosphere of political attack and counterattack, I argue, political verse came to occupy a discursive space similar to that later claimed by organized political parties. At a time when elections were contested only indirectly, and the concept of the modern political campaign did not yet exist,20 poems and songs performed a variety of partisan functions, from invoking the preferred political language of one’s own party to defining the opposing party as a dangerous faction and warning against the dire consequences of elevating its leaders to positions of national power. Thus it is that in the period between 1796, the year of the first contested presidential election, and 1801, the year of the first partisan transfer of power, the number and variety of poems of retaliation reached their highest point. Dozens of individual poets and songwriters entered the fray in these years, protesting or advocating for policies and candidates, and ritually naming or defining their opposition as aristocratic or Jacobin, the “party of Britain” or the “party of France.”
As is suggested by these latter epithets, moreover, the political and literary struggles surrounding the formation of the new Unites States were not limited to national politics or identity alone but rather involved a crucial transatlantic or transnational context that permeated both culture and politics in the Revolutionary and early republican periods. Indeed, I cite numerous examples of American and British poets who—despite writing at odds with each other about events and issues—nevertheless draw on a common literary tradition within which, as Leonard Tennenhouse has recently put it, American cultural identity often appears as a “brand of Englishness.”21 By extending this transnational perspective to the poetry wars of the 1790s, moreover, this book seeks to illuminate an additional set of complications. Insofar as the first party system arose against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Anglo-French wars of the 1790s, the debate over America’s political identity itself came into being amid this imperial conflict. As we shall see, this triangular relationship between Britain, France, and the United States made for a variety of complex intersections among culture, politics, and nationalism. Such is the backdrop, for instance, in which an American Republican such as St. George Tucker could draw on the English satiric persona of Peter Pindar to attack the administration and to defend the French Revolution, only to be answered by a group of Federalist wits employing the identical literary allusion