Introduction: Philip Freneau (1752–1832)
Born in New York into a well-to-do family, Philip Freneau was tutored at home before entering the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). The two important focuses of his future work—that is, politics and literature— might be discerned in two important friendships he made there, with James Madison, a future president, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748–1816), a future novelist. He and Brackenridge collaborated on a commencement poem entitled The Rising Glory of America. A humanist and deistic optimist, Freneau thus early on in his writing expressed hope for America as a separate, democratic—and utopian—nation.
After graduating, Freneau taught briefly then traveled in 1776 to the West Indies to work as secretary on a plantation. His poem “The Beauties of Santa Cruz” reveals both the beauties of nature there and the misery of the impoverished and enslaved; indeed, it curses the ship that brought slaves to that island. After leaving the West Indies in 1778, Freneau took to the seas himself, serving as a seaman on a blockade runner. While on an American ship, he was captured and taken prisoner by the British. His poem “The British Prison Ship” (1781) describes his brutal treatment by the British while their prisoner.
With harsh invective, he continued to attack the British and support the Revolution, most particularly through his work as journalist and editor of The Freeman’s Journal, an anti-British newspaper. During this time, he became known as the Poet of the Revolution. After the war, Freneau edited The New York Daily Advertiser and established and edited the anti-Federalist journal TThe National Gazette. In 1791, he worked as translating clerk in the Department of State of Thomas Jefferson, an avowed Democratic-Republican and then secretary of state. During that time, Freneau also vigorously attacked the Gazette of the United States, a Federalist vehicle edited by John Fenno (1751–1798) and supported by Alexander Hamilton, an avowed Federalist and opponent of Jefferson’s. Through these critical pieces, Freneau became known as a powerful political satirist and is now considered a forerunner in satirical journalism. Coinciding with Jefferson’s withdrawal from politics in 1793, Freneau’s National Gazette folded.
Freneau subsequently supported himself through captaining trading vessels and farming. He also wrote and published—by his own hand, with his own printing press—various poems and essays, with collections of his work appearing in 1795 and 1799. The love of nature and focus on the personal in his poetry strikes an early Romantic note in American literature. He offset the corruption of developing urbanism through what he described as the simplicity of Native American life. His poetry remains remarkable for its concreteness, sensuality, and intensity, qualities that herald the work of James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville. Freneau died in 1832 from exposure during a blizzard.
Poems
To Sir Toby (1795)
A Sugar Planter in the interior parts of Jamaica, near the City of San Jago de la Vega, (Spanish Town) 1784
“The motions of his spirit are black as night, And his affections dark as Erebus.”
—Shakespeare.
If there exists a hell—the case is clear—
Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here:
Here are no blazing brimstone lakes—’tis true;
But kindled Rum too often burns as blue;
In which some fiend, whom nature must detest,
Steeps Toby’s brand, and marks poor Cudjoe’s breast.
Here whips on whips excite perpetual fears,
And mingled howlings vibrate on my ears:
Here nature’s plagues abound, to fret and teaze,
Snakes, scorpions, despots, lizards, centipees—
No art, no care escapes the busy lash;
All have their dues—and all are paid in cash—
The eternal driver keeps a steady eye
On a black herd, who would his vengeance fly,
But chained, imprisoned, on a burning soil,
For the mean avarice of a tyrant, toil!
The lengthy cart-whip guards this monster’s reign—
And cracks, like pistols, from the fields of cane.
Ye powers! who formed these wretched tribes, relate,
What had they done, to merit such a fate!
Why were they brought from Eboe’s sultry waste,
To see that plenty which they must not taste—
Food, which they cannot buy, and dare not steal;
Yams and potatoes—many a scanty meal!—
One, with a gibbet wakes his negro’s fears,
One to the windmill nails him by the ears;
One keeps his slave in darkened dens, unfed,
One puts the wretch in pickle ere he’s dead:
This, from a tree suspends him by the thumbs,
That, from his table grudges even the crumbs!
O’er yond’ rough hills a tribe of females go,
Each with her gourd, her infant, and her hoe;
Scorched by a sun that has no mercy here,
Driven by a devil, whom men call overseer—
In chains, twelve wretches to their labours haste;
Twice twelve I saw, with iron collars graced!—
Are such the fruits that spring from vast domains?
Is wealth, thus got, Sir Toby, worth your pains!—
Who would your wealth on terms, like these, possess,
Where all we see is pregnant with distress—
Angola’s natives scourged by ruffian hands,
And toil’s hard product shipp’d to foreign lands.
Talk not of blossoms, and your endless spring;
What joy, what smile, can scenes of misery bring?—
Though Nature, here, has every blessing spread,
Poor is the labourer—and how meanly fed!—
Here Stygian paintings light and shade renew,
Pictures of hell, that Virgil’s[C] pencil drew:
Here, surly Charons make their annual trip,
And ghosts arrive in every Guinea ship,
To find what beasts these western isles afford,
Plutonian scourges, and despotic lords:—
Here, they, of stuff determined to be free,
Must climb the rude cliffs of the Liguanee;
Beyond the clouds, in sculking haste repair,
And hardly safe from brother traitors there.—
The Indian Burying Ground (1788)
In spite of all the learned have said,
I still my old opinion keep;
The posture, that we give the dead,
Points out the soul’s eternal sleep.
Not so the ancients of these lands—
The Indian, when from life released,
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.
His imaged birds, and painted bowl,
And venison, for a journey dressed,
Bespeak the nature of the soul,
Activity, that knows no rest.
His bow, for action ready bent,
And arrows, with a head of stone,
Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the old ideas gone.
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,
No fraud upon the dead commit—
Observe the swelling turf, and say
They do not lie, but here they sit.
Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace
(Now wasted, half, by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.
Here still an aged elm aspires,
Beneath whose far-projecting shade
(And which the shepherd still admires)
The children of the forest played!
There oft a restless Indian queen
(Pale Shebah, with her braided hair)
And many a barbarous form is seen
To chide the man that lingers there.
By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews;
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer, a shade![364]
And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.
“Bright as the bow that spans the storm
In Erin’s yellow vesture clad,
A son of light—a lovely form
He comes and makes her glad;
Now on the grass-green turf he sits,
His tassel’d horn beside him laid;
Now o’er the hills in chase he flits,
The hunter and the deer a shade!”
