[October 7th
marks the 250th anniversary of the convening of the
Stamp Act Congress, one of the most significant moments in
pre-Revolutionary American history. So this week I’ll highlight and
AmericanStudy three such pre-Revolution moments, including the Congress itself
on Wednesday. Leading up to a weekend post on some of the best scholars of this
period, past and present!]
On the poetic letter
that both anticipates the Declaration and helps us remember a vital figure.
No American
creative writer (unless we define Thomas Paine’s
pamphlets as creative writing, but despite Paine’s unquestionable
rhetorical talents I would call those texts political documents first and
foremost) played a larger role in the developing American Revolution than did African American slave and
poet Phillis Wheatley. As I highlighted
in this post, Wheatley’s poetic celebration of and subsequent meeting with General
George Washington represent two interconnected, exemplary Revolutionary
moments. And her 1773 poem “To
the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” about a portion of which I
wrote
in this post on Wheatley’s seemingly contradictory poetic constructions of
slavery and race, comprises perhaps the single clearest literary argument for
the unfolding Revolution, anticipating quite strikingly the language of the
Declaration of Independence.
That’s particularly
the case with the poem’s most overt argument for independence, contained in one
long sentence that takes up the final five lines of the ten-line second stanza:
“No more, America, in mournful strain/Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d
complain,/No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,/Which wanton Tyranny with
lawless hand/Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.” Although the
poem as a whole is addressed to a specific English audience member (on whom
more in a moment), in this crucial section Wheatley shifts her address to all
of “America,” personifying this developing political entity as “thou” and
making the case for “the Goddess … Fair Freedom” (the similarly personified subject
of the poem’s opening stanza) as the logical and necessary mechanism through
which to push back on and overturn all of the negative elements included in
this sentence (wrongs, grievance, iron chain, Tyranny, lawless hand,
enslavement). Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense” has been described
as a direct predecessor to the Declaration, but to my mind no text fits
that description better than Wheatley’s poem.
Wheatley’s
addressee is quite different from the Declaration’s, however. While the latter
text is aimed at King George III, not to convince him of anything so much as to
use a critique of the king to make the case for independence, Wheatley’s poetic
letter seeks precisely to persuade her singular audience member of the value
and necessity of freedom. That audience member was William
Legge, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies
between 1772 and 1775, and a man whom Wheatley had met in
London and believed sympathetic to the cause (perhaps in part because of
his opposition to the Stamp Act). Legge did not succumb to Wheatley’s poetic
charms, and by 1776 was entirely opposed to the Revolution and an ardent
supporter of the use of military force to quash it. Yet nevertheless, he—like Wheatley’s
address to him—reminds us that the English community in this period was no more
unified nor certain of its future than was the American. And in his contributions
toward the founding of Eleazar
Wheelock’s evangelical college for Native Americans, an institution that
would become Dartmouth College, Legge also illustrates the complex,
multi-layered relationship that so many in England had toward the colonies and
their peoples.
Last
pre-Revolutionary post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Pre-Revolution moments you’d highlight?
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