Literature of the revolu

tionary period mainly political.

CHAPTER II.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD-1765-1815.

IT WILL be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. This half century was the formative era of the American nation. Historically, it is divisible into the years of revolution and the years of construction. But the men who led the movement for independence were also, in great part, the same who guided in shaping the constitution of the new republic, and the intellectual impress of the whole period is one and the same. The character of the age was as distinctly political as that of the colonial era-in New England at least-was theological; and literature must still continue to borrow its interest from history. Pure literature, or what, for want of a better term, we call belles-lettres, was not born in America until the nineteenth century was well under way. It is true that the Revolution had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction; but these were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated the consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared with the contemporary work of English authors like Cowper and Sheridan and Burke. Their importance for us to-day is rather antiquarian than literary, though the most noteworthy of them will be mentioned in due course in the present chapter. It is also true that

42

one or two of Irving's early books fall within the last years of the period now under consideration. But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, and these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent chapter.

tory.

Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that preceded and accompanied the revolutionary movement were the speeches of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the Political oraart of a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and Congresses of revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a rhetorical age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the declamatory "Letters of Junius," and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. speech is good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional, rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are really literature. If this is true, even where the words of an orator are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the oration produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that posterity can judge of them only at second hand. Patrick Henry has fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not in the letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these

A

Patrick

Henry.

Speech in the
Convention of
Delegates,

March 28, 1775.

The patriot press.

the most famous was the defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by schoolboys, and many of them remain as familiar as household words. "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . Gentlemen may cry

Is life so dear,

peace, peace, but there is no peace.
or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know
not what course others may take, but as for me, give
me liberty, or give me death!" The eloquence of Patrick
Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But if
such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as
have come down to us fail to account for the wonderful
impression that their words are said to have produced
upon their fellow-countrymen, we should remember that
they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard.
The imagination should supply all those accessories which
gave them vitality when first pronounced-the living pres-
ence and voice of the speaker; the listening Senate; the
grave excitement of the hour and of the impending con-
flict. The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly latin-
ized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hun-
dreds of Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into
platitudes all these coming hot from the lips of men
whose actions in the field confirmed the earnestness of
their speech-were effective in the crisis and for the
purpose to which they were addressed.

The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock wrote constantly, for 'the newspapers, essays and letters on the public questions of the

แ

Adams.

time signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent,"
"Brutus," "Cassius," and the like, and couched in language
which to the taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical.
Among the most important of these political essays were
the "Circular Letter to each Colonial Legislature," pub-
lished by Adams and Otis in 1768, Quincy's Observa- Samuel
tions on the Boston Port Bill," 1774, and Otis's "Rights
of the British Colonies,” a pamphlet of one hundred and
twenty pages, printed in 1764. No collection of Otis's
writings has ever been made. The life of Quincy, pub-
lished by his son, preserves for posterity his journals and
correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at
the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports.

Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the American people are such state documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages, inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, and the father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the memory of all readers. One sentence in particular has been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion: "We hold these truths to be self-evident-that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern. readers is the following, which an English historian of our literature calls "the most eloquent clause of that great document," and "the most interesting suppressed passage in American literature." Jefferson was a southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on the subject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King

James Otis.

Josiah

Quincy.

Thomas Jeffer-
Declaration
of Independ-
ence.

son and the

The sup

pressed passage.

Early utterances on the slavery question.

John Randolph of Roanoke.

George for promoting the "peculiar institution

was left

out from the final draft of the Declaration in deference to southern members.

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other southern statesmen afterward adopted on the subject of slavery was not taken by the men of Jefferson's generation. Another famous Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, himself a slave-holder, in his speech on the militia bill in the House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said: "I speak from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her bosom." This was said apropos of the danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a war with England—a war which actually broke out in the year following, but was not attended with the slave-rising which Randolph predicted. Randolph was a thoroughgoing

Randolph was