1

Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism

“The Rising Glory of America”

Philip Freneau’s “The Rising Glory of America” is arguably the most important American poem of its age. Its composition is entangled in the historical events that created American independence, and it was written by a poet who (later) probably had more direct influence on the nation’s politics than any other poet in America’s history. (His closest competitor is probably Archibald MacLeish.) It articulates many of the formative myths in the cultural imagination that brought the American nation into being: the translatio studii and translatio imperii ideas that resurfaced in the nineteenth century as “manifest destiny”; the conflicting anglophilia and anglophobia of England’s rebellious offspring; the conflicting Whiggish trust in progress versus a romantic Noble Savagism; the so-called leyenda negra of depraved Spanish colonization; and the complementary (and later conflicting) visions of a Hamiltonian future built on commerce or a Jeffersonian future built on agriculture. The poem culminates in a vision of America as site of the biblical New Jerusalem, descending from the heavens and settling somewhere, roughly, in the vicinity of New Jersey, a vision presented with all its implications of Americans as an exceptional chosen people, a light to all nations, under the approving eye of God’s Providence. Yet the author is uncertain about biblical authority, and the poem reveals him in the act of hesitating between biblical literalism and deistic rationalism, as it does in the act of shifting allegiance from a providential to a political future, without making too fine a distinction between them. As such, it is a demonstration piece for Sacvan Bercovich’s familiar thesis about the transformation of biblical myth into political rhetoric. The poem, I would argue, is artfully presented not merely to articulate these conflicting nationalist mythologies but to hold them in suspension.

My impulse to write about Freneau arises from the neglect and apparent misunderstanding of a poem that holds such a focal position in the landscape of American poetry. A first step in reclaiming this text is to sever its dual authorship, to consider a work not by “Brackenridge and Freneau,” as it was in its first printing before the Revolution, but by Freneau alone. For even in these sophisticated days of fluid texts and literary collaborations, the ghost of Brackenridge has proven a distraction, even a source of outright error. Brackenridge was, of course, co-author of the 1772 printing of the poem, some version of which he recited at the Princeton commencement exercises. That poem is, in Susan Castillo’s words, “a complex and many-layered document, in which we can note not one but two authorial voices, which often coexist uneasily” (“Imperial Pasts,” 27). True as this may be, the 1772 text is also a confusing jumble, so it remains interesting as a historical rather than as a literary work.

Fortunately, the nagging issues of text and authorship have been sorted out in a meticulous bibliographic study by J.F.W. Smeall. The poem began as an address written for the Commencement exercises at Princeton in 1771 on the hot topic of the day suggested by the university president John Witherspoon, visionary educator and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Since Freneau could not attend, it was recited as a graduation ode by Brackenridge on 25 September 1771 and “greeted with great applause,” according to fellow student James Madison (who was in fact absent because of illness). That text is not extant.1 But, in 1772, a conflation of Brackenridge’s poem with Freneau’s, which was cast in the form of a three-way dialogue, was issued as a pamphlet, preserving the dialogue device – perhaps, Smeall suggests, “because the two poets had distinct, almost contradictory images of American Indians, of the good life in America, and of America’s destiny” (265). This poem is a hodge-podge. As Smeall notes, neither poet’s portion shows awareness of the arguments of the other. Brackenridge says: “See the America of the past, incult, dreary, listless, Amerind; see the work that discovered and planted it; see the present glory of it and ask: how has this come about, if not through Agriculture, Commerce, and men like Whitefield? So now look to America’s future” (277). Freneau says: “see the uncharitable, luxurious rapacity of the Spaniards vis-a-vis the Amerinds; contrast our liberty-seeking British ways, given to peaceful treaty, pastoral simplicities, and science; so look to a future, when evil will have been extirpated, and ‘the lion and the lamb in mutual friendship link’d shall browse the shrub” (277).

Although literary historians frequently refer to Freneau’s poem, few have considered it at any length, and most focus, for their own purposes, on this 1772 text. None has acknowledged the considerable artistic achievement of the 1786 poem. Kenneth Silverman considers the 1772 version in the context of the translatio studii idea, contrasting it with earlier “rising glory” poems by Dwight and Trumbull. Freneau’s view of history, he claims, “is neither cyclic like Trumbull’s nor providential like Dwight’s, but linear” (Cultural History, 232); yet the passages he quotes from the poem as Freneau’s are almost exclusively by Brackenridge. Silverman’s comment emphatically does not apply to Freneau’s 1786 poem, which is not linear but millennial. Hans-Joachim Lang takes account of Smeall’s work but passes over the collaborative poem quickly in order to contrast the later careers of the two men. Eric Wertheimer, in a probing article (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 1994), discusses both the 1772 and 1786 poems but without citing Smeall. Like Silverman, he thus attributes bits written by Brackenridge to “Freneau” (38/22),2 and he concentrates his postcolonialist reading on the themes of the Black Legend of Spanish conquest and the treatment of Amerind history. His analysis is acute, and he draws meaningful contrasts between the earlier and later texts; but his analysis misses the feelings of anxiety and internal conflict within Freneau’s 1786 poem.

Even Susan Castillo, in an article that, citing Smeall, focuses exclusively on Freneau’s 1786 text, hedges by repeatedly dragging Brackenridge’s name into her title and into the text of her article, without explanation, as a kind of scholarly genteelism, despite Freneau’s clear statement that “the poem is a little altered from the original (published in Philadelphia in 1772), such parts being only inserted here as were written by the author of these volumes“ (my emphasis). Castillo describes the 1786 poem as “predominantly” by Freneau (“Imperial Pasts,” 28), and she blames its supposedly inconsistent characterization of the speakers on “the text’s dual authorship” (29). Nonetheless, her suspicion that the poem betrays some Brackenridgean residue is not unfounded. One part of Freneau’s mind embraces the rationalist, pragmatic attitudes of his collaborator. But another part questions.

Freneau casts his poem as a three-way dialogue, a format often found in early modern books of instruction. Susan Castillo applies a great deal of erudition to the history of dialogic rhetoric in general, going back to Aristotle, and in the poetry of Puritan New England. She draws the distinction between Platonic (or dialectical) dialogue, seeking after absolute truth, and Aristotelian (or rhetorical) dialogue, considering all sides of a question. In practice, she finds that New England poetic dialogues exhibit a “hybrid” character, exhibiting “tension” or “instability” (41). But her conclusion muddles Freneau’s poem with the 1772 collaborative text: “Brackenridge and Freneau’s use of the dialogue form at this transitional moment, when America was no longer a colony but not yet an empire, is particularly fascinating. This dialogue is a particularly evocative reflection of the passage from colonial to post-colonial creole hybridity to neo-colonial (that is, imperial) expansionism that was taking place in the United States in 1787” (41).

I endorse Castillo’s discovery of tension and hybridity in the poem, not to mention its fascination, but argue that Freneau’s poem by itself, without Brackenridge, exhibits these qualities. Freneau’s multivocalism is his own. As for Freneau’s literary antecedents – which have not been adequately studied – one must take into account not only the Puritan dialogue poem but the neo-Virgilian pastoral dialogue (with borrowings at the end from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue plus Pope’s biblical adaptation in his “Messiah”) as well as the Whig “progress poem” that stands behind the whole rising glory tradition up to and including Barlow.3

One peculiarity of Freneau’s visionary politics in this poem is that it scarcely reflects the radical democrat of the French Revolutionary 1790s, and yet Freneau continued to polish and publish it proudly to the end of his days. By the 1790s, as is well known, Freneau had been hired by Jefferson, then in Washington’s cabinet, as translator. An unflinching advocate of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and the French Revolution, which deeply worried the Federalist wing of the administration, he was even more extreme than the Girondist Paine, identifying with the Jacobins. As a radical journalist, he incited the break between the Federalist faction and the Jeffersonian democrats. In the words of Vernon Parrington, Freneau, as “the leading editor of America,” “probably more largely than any other writer … awakened a popular distrust of Federalist men and measures, which a few years later was to break the party” (Main Currents, 1:385). Washington, in anger, called him “that rascal Freneau” and tried to get Jefferson to fire him; Jefferson, on the other hand, maintained: “His paper has saved our Constitution, which was fast galloping into monarchy” (1:285).

Even so, when Freneau wrote his poem these political tensions had not yet risen to the surface. Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian sentiments co-exist in the same mind, and that is precisely the state of affairs one finds in “The Rising Glory.” This mind too, at some undeterminable point on its journey towards deism, grapples with the claims of biblical literalism and never resolves the contradiction. One of the poem’s greatest fascinations is that, within its dialogue, it articulates opposing American myths at once, holds them in suspension without prejudicing one or the other, holds them while scarcely noticing any incongruity. It is a snapshot of the defining myths of the nation in their formation.

Despite Susan Castillo’s aesthetic strictures on the poem – she ascribes its “jagged and uneven character” to its “cut-and-paste origin” (“Imperial Pasts,” 28) – Freneau’s 1786 revision, shorn from Brackenridge, is a marvel of ordonnance. Much of the great strength of the poem lies in its lucid argumentative design. In 468 lines of vigorous blank verse (admitting an occasional Virgilian half line), Freneau rotates the sixteen speeches of his three speakers five times, finishing as he began with Acasto, who acts through most of the poem as debate moderator, introducing each new subject and allowing the others to comment, before he brings the poem to conclusion in prophetic splendour. Eugenio, speaking first, is a past-oriented and compassionate figure, eventually identifying himself with a proto-Jeffersonian pastoralism. Leander, on the other hand, is future-oriented, optimistic, a champion of commerce in proto-Hamiltonian manner. Neither voice gains the upper hand. The two together represent a debate not between Freneau and Brackenridge, as one might be tempted to say, but between competing impulses within Freneau himself and within colonial society at large. Both voices show a capacity for probing their topics, offering several possible solutions, and suspending judgment. Between them, looking to past, present, and future, they map a synoptic view of colonial American myth.

Freneau’s poem is a concerted effort to make moral sense of the contingencies of history; it is, in short, an effort to justify the colonial settlement of the New World, either on rational or providential grounds. The first two rounds, in the typical pattern of the progress poem, look to the past, first speculating on the origins of the Native Americans, then commenting on the difficulties of European settlement. The next two rounds deal with the present, first the glories of agriculture, then the promise of commerce and science. Acasto then introduces the final round by summoning the great scene in Isaiah, chapter 6, calling the prophet to his mission:

This might we do, if warmed by that bright coal

Snatch’d from the altar of cherubic fire

Which touched Isaiah’s lips – or if the spirit

Of Jeremy and Amos, prophets old,

Might swell the heaving breast – I see, I see

Freedom’s establish’d reign; cities, and men,

Numerous as sands upon the ocean shore,

And empires rising where the suns descend.⁴

Eugenio, glancing backward, denounces recent British oppression, Governor Bernard, and the Boston Massacre of 1770; Leander, with “almost [a] shudder at the recollection,” turns to the future, when we will be “a pattern to the world,” and Acasto takes over with an extended portrait of the New Jerusalem. Here the exalted sound of the word “freedom” is heard, though the notion of human “equality” is entirely foreign to the poem.

The opening round examines some of the more colourful conjectures about Indian origins, in a tone overtly sympathetic but ultimately ambivalent. Acasto begins by denouncing the hated Spanish, blaming their bloody conquest on greed for gold, while the British have come with benevolence in their hearts:

Better these northern realms demand our song,

Design’d by nature for the rural reign,

For agriculture’s toil. – No blood we shed

For metals buried in a rocky waste.

The wilful blindness of Acasto’s claim to be innocent of bloodshed is transparent: but Freneau’s purpose is at one stroke to marginalize the Spanish threat, valorize the agricultural economy, and open the way for Eugenio’s temperate reflections on “the vagrant race who love the shady vale.” In a larger sense, the leyenda negra helps Freneau in his post-Revolutionary poem to moderate his attitudes towards the British, so recently the colonial oppressor and military enemy, but still a lesser evil than the Spanish, made brutal by gold “that prompts mankind to shed their kindred blood.”

For Eugenio, the Indians are truly “kindred blood” because, however puzzling, they must be descended from Adam and Eve. Eugenio’s speeches are consistently more soft-hearted than Leander’s: they reflect the anxieties of a Freneau who, in Wertheimer’s words, “is never fully comfortable with the traditional British argument” for settlement (48/34), a Freneau ever anxious about American moral justification. Eugenio thus strives to harmonize the Aboriginal fact with biblical record; and, despite Freneau’s later deism and Leander’s prompt rejection of Eugenio’s literalist “sophistry,” the young Freneau is still speaking from his experience as a student of theology. As Nelson F. Adkins notes in a careful study, Freneau’s biblical interest continued to the end of his life, and he advises that “any attempt to assert the precise moment of Freneau’s break with fundamentalist religious doctrine would … be hazardous” (Freneau, 17).5 Thus Eugenio momentarily entertains theories that the Natives were products of a separate creation “in their own lands, like Adam in the east,” or that they somehow “high on the Andes” survived the Flood. But he quickly dismisses such thoughts: “this the sacred oracles deny.”

His speculations then extend to the Arctic migration theory – they might be Siberians or Tartars or even “banished Jews” (the ten lost tribes) who came “over icy mountains, or on floats.” He then concludes with an even grander flourish of cosmological speculation, supposing that:

        In Peleg’s days,

(So says the Hebrew seer’s unerring pen)

This mighty mass of earth, this common globe,

Was cleft in twain, – “divided” east and west,

While then perhaps the deep Atlantic roll’d, –

Through the vast chasm, and laved the solid world.⁶

Tectonic plate theory and the rift of Pangaea would not have startled Freneau, it seems. This fantasy is based on an obscure verse found amid the Genesis genealogies tracing the sons of Noah to the ancestors of Abraham: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days was the earth divided (the name Peleg means “division,” and the Hebrew word is used elsewhere in scripture for a rivulet or canal). Freneau proudly highlights his scriptural ingenuity with a footnote referring the reader to Genesis 10:25. Freneau may already have been acquainted with the primary biblical commentary of his theological studies in 1773–74, as Adkins tells us, through Matthew Henry’s Exposition of the Old and New Testaments … with Practical Remarks and Observations (1708–10), where he read in volume 1: “The reason of the name of Peleg (v. 25): Because in his days (that is, about the time of his birth, when his name was given him), was the earth divided among the children of men that were to inhabit it; either when Noah divided it by an orderly distribution of it, as Joshua divided the land of Canaan by lot, or when, upon their refusal to comply with that division, God, in justice, divided them by the confusion of tongues: whichsoever of these was the occasion, pious Heber saw cause to perpetuate the remembrance of it in the name of his son; and justly may our sons be called by the same name, for in our days, in another sense, is the earth, the church, most wretchedly divided” (1:78). Lee Huddleston (Origins, 40–5) has traced this idea back to Spanish writings of Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1570) and Miguel Cabello Valboa (ca. 1582). Freneau could have picked it up indirectly or he could even have hit upon it himself.

But Leander, in a character-defining gesture, scoffs at Eugenio’s theories and pronounces the “true” source:

Your sophistry, Eugenio, makes me smile …

But for uncertainties, your broken isles,

Your northern Tartars, and your wandering Jews,

(The flimsy cobwebs of a sophist’s brain)

Hear what the voice of history proclaims:

“History,” to Leander, stands for two empirical authorities: first, the record of classical explorers (like the Carthaginian Hanno in the fifth century BC) and, second, cold common sense. The Natives, he explains, descend from an errant shipload of ancient Carthaginians, blown off course to South America. This is the only moment in the poem when the two debaters are entirely at odds with one another, and their opposition survives intact from the 1772 text. The convenience of Leander’s theory – “the most persistent of all the trans-Atlantic origin theories” (Huddleston, Origins, 17) – is that it explains the relatively “civilized” and urbanized cultures of the Incas and the Aztecs: they are offshoots of a European civilization. (Significantly, the New World cities formed from “Indian architecture” in 1786 had been formed from “European architecture” in 1772.) Castillo notes a minor discrepancy in that the Carthaginians, being African, were “irrevocably Other” (33); but our knowledge of them is from comfortable Greek and Latin sources. For Leander is not only a “rational” historian but a believer in urbane science and commerce. Leander’s Indians are no pastoral forest dwellers but builders of “vast empires, kingdoms, cities, palaces / And polished nations,” “huge cities form’d / From Indian architecture.” Their destruction by “haughty Spain” is therefore all the more deplorable.

Yet Leander too runs into difficulty: If some natives were capable of building a Cuzco or a Tenochtitlan, why are the locals so degraded?

But here, amid this northern dark domain

No towns were seen to rise. – No arts were here;

The tribes unskill’d to raise the lofty mast,

Or force the daring prow thro’ adverse waves,

Gazed on the pregnant soil, and craved alone

Life from the unaided genius of the ground.

These lines have been added to the 1772 text – to supply, perhaps, Brackenridge’s view of the degraded Indian not otherwise expressed in Freneau’s poem. Leander in 1786 is forced to leave the question open: “This indicates they were a different race; / From whom descended, ’tis not ours to say.” A “different race” – from the Incas? from the human? Leander’s ambiguity ominously opens up the latter possibility. The local Natives are a species wholly Other, as he concludes with a vision of Aboriginal degeneracy.

Unlike Brackenridge, Freneau omits references to “horrid rites and forms / Of human sacrifice” and seems too sympathetic by temperament with the Native American to expand on their degenerate condition as Brackenridge does.7 But the implications of Leander’s analysis are clear. Just as humanist thinking saw human degeneracy in the loss of the Greek or Roman Golden Age, so, remarks Robert Berkhofer, did it see the Indian as a sign of “the continuing degeneration after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden” (White Man’s Indian, 36); cultural diversity was evidence of “decline not progress, corruption not advancement,” and, accordingly, “Indians were portrayed as corrupt copies of the Jewish or other high civilizations of the past or, at worst, the very agents of Satan’s own degeneracy” (37). As Wertheimer demonstrates, this absence of “civilization” provided the European mind with justification in law for colonization (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 42–3/27–8). Significantly, however, Freneau’s analysis is neither linear nor single minded. It is tentative, open to diverse approaches – from biblical literalism to “enlightened” historicism – and it affirms no one solution.

If Freneau’s poem is actively concerned with the Native presence, still felt in the white settlements, the absence of any reference to the African presence and debates about slavery is worth noting. John Woolman’s “Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes” had appeared in 1754 in Philadelphia, so the issue was emerging, but just in its beginning stages. Freneau, who later wrote poems attacking slavery in the Caribbean, does not yet sense it as a difficulty.

In the second round, Acasto, still looking back in time, invites the two debaters to relate their versions of settlement. Eugenio emphasizes the need to escape the oppression of “Europe’s hostile shores” and praises the Quaker William Penn, “Solon of our western lands,” widely regarded as a just peacemaker. As in his first speech, he minimizes violence and deplores bloodshed – “what Indian hosts were slain / Before the days of peace were quite restored!” Leander, more bloody minded, interrupts with praise for the colonist’s struggle against “fierce Indian tribes” and the heroism of British general Wolfe at Quebec, “who, dying, conquered.” These lines were composed before the Revolution, and Wertheimer offers perceptive comments on the altered meaning of “awes” in line 188 (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 47–8/33–4) – the “subject host” now referring to Tory loyalists in Labrador or Cape Breton. Freneau has not only much abbreviated his praise of British courage – Wolfe is kept, but General Braddock is dropped8 – he has also mollified Leander’s animus against the Native tribes. Before the war, with “deadly malice” and “false design” they “murder’d half the hapless colonies”; after the war, with malice described as “vengeful” (acknowledging genuine wrongs suffered) they “murdered or dispersed these colonies.” The comments on the French, too, get softened. As enemies of the British they are no longer “that inglorious race / False Gallia’s sons,” but, more neutrally,“Gallia’s hostile sons.” The fourteen intervening years saw not only the British as enemies but also Lafayette’s intervention at Yorktown and Freneau’s personal trauma as prisoner of war recorded in his poem “The British Prison Ship.”

Furthermore, Freneau heavily reworks Eugenio’s characterization of the new colonies:

New governments (their wealth unenvied yet)

Were form’d on liberty and virtue’s plan.

These searching out uncultivated tracts

Conceived new plans of towns, and capitals,

And spacious provinces.

With a parenthetic dig at Britain’s mulcting of its colonies (taxation without representation), he replaces the redundant 1772 phrase “liberty and freedom” with the self-congratulatory “liberty and virtue’s plan.” Eugenio’s “freedom” still retains the Puritan assumption that it entails the pursuit of virtue.

Acasto’s lines opening the third round of debate may be read as merely transitional, but thematically they introduce the characteristic American gesture of disowning the past: “The dead, Leander, are but empty names.” And his phrase “ten centuries ago” ties his gesture to the millennial vision with which he will end the poem. After laying epic heroes like Ajax and Achilles in the dust, Acasto turns to General Washington, who now “prunes the tender vine” and raises “luxuriant harvests” from the soil. This entire passage is new, of course, to the 1786 text, but, strange to say, Freneau elides entirely Washington’s military leadership in the Revolution. The only reference to his war-like deeds goes back instead to his expedition with Braddock, “where wild Ohio pours the mazy flood.” (This reminiscence was prompted perhaps because the new passage replaces original lines praising Sir William Johnson in the French-Indian War.) Acasto’s privileging of agriculture might have been noticed already in his opening speech, where he describes an America “designed by nature for the rural reign, / For agriculture’s toil.” (These lines are also new in 1786.) Almost inexplicably, Freneau does not appeal to the Roman myth of Cincinnatus, so often used as template for the victorious general who retired modestly to his Mount Vernon farm; nonetheless, Washington as pastoral exemplar introduces the joint themes of agriculture and commerce that represent the present condition of America.

One might have expected Freneau in the third and fourth rounds of speeches to allot agriculture to Eugenio and commerce to the brash modernist Leander. Instead, however, he allows both speakers to address both topics, implying, reasonably enough, that both sectors are essential to the rising nation. (Later American writers are not always as even handed.) Eugenio, returning to the Black Legend, expands on the moral superiority of peaceful American agriculture to Spanish bloodlust for gold. Leander then takes his cue from Eugenio and depicts an Arcadian scene. As Smeall points out (“Respective Roles,” 274–5), Freneau envisions agriculture in terms of “uncorrupted, family-farm pastoralism,” while Brackenridge was more interested in a “cash-market” that flows directly into his remarks on commerce. This is Brackenridge:

Much wealth and pleasure agriculture brings;

Far in the woods she raises palaces,

Puisant states and crowded realms where late

A desart plain or frowning wilderness

Deform’d the view; or where with moving tents

The scatter’d nations seeking pasturage,

Wander’d from clime to clime incultivate.

Brackenridge imagines an American wilderness populated by a few nomadic and negligible Indians, no more than a “desart”; his agriculture emphasizes wealth, or what Emerson termed “Commodity.”

Freneau’s agriculture, on the other hand, is literary, a classical pastoral that emphasizes a life lived in stasis, security, and satisfaction. He alludes to Homer’s Laertes, a king who is also a commoner willing to dirty his hands in the “grateful soil.” As Wertheimer observes, his depiction “implicitly suggests the politics of radical Jeffersonianism” (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 46/32). True enough. But Freneau’s sketch is rather the pre-Jeffersonian pax Augustana of eighteenth-century pastoral so compellingly described by William C. Dowling. In the Georgics of Virgil as in the topographical poetry of the Augustans, Freneau’s lines on Washington reflect “the idea of literature as the republic-in-exile, the Greek or Roman polis as it has vanished from actual history and rematerialized inside language” (Dowling, Poetry and Ideology, 35). Yet to Freneau in 1786, the Roman republic-in-exile has, seemingly, been restored in the New World. “This is the moment at which the rise of Rome from an unimportant city in western Italy to dominance in the Mediterranean world had begun to transform itself into a cultural myth, its point being not the military and economic power exercised by Rome after its final victory over Carthage … but the presumed source of that power in a political culture giving citizens a free voice” (34). Freneau recalls his countrymen to the landscape of the Virgilian Georgic, “to the simple life of field and vineyard from which their earliest glory had sprung, quietly insisting on the genuine source of imperial greatness in an agrarian virtue” (35). To Freneau as to Jefferson, it seems, “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God” (217). Yet Freneau’s exemplar is the future Federalist Washington, not Jefferson – the Federalist-Democrat rift has not yet taken place. Nor has the more subtle rift between the agrarian planter Jefferson and the radicalized egalitarian Jefferson yet appeared.

The contrast between Freneau and Brackenridge is not absolute either. In 1786, Freneau incorporated the following lines:

The inclosure, now, succeeds the shepherd’s care,

Yet milk-white flocks adorn the well stock’d farm,

And court the attention of the industrious swain –

Their fleece rewards him well.

Freneau notes the advance from fenceless sheep-herding in order to increase the sense of property and civility, perhaps taking his cue from Brackenridge’s nomads. But his reference to “inclosure” bears no hint of social tension or geographical limitation such as Goldsmith lamented in England in “The Deserted Village” (1770). The land is open, free, inexhaustible – the New World knows no physical limits and did not even begin to sense them until more than a century afterwards.

Acasto’s transition to the fourth round of speeches on commerce is completely recast from 1772. It emphasizes the necessity of commerce not for the sake of wealth alone but as a civilizing force, adducing the biblical example of King Solomon’s trade with Golconda and Ophir. Agriculture alone is not enough: “Strip Commerce of her sail and men once more / Would be converted into savages.” Eugenio’s speech – preserved with minor revision apart from a few new lines on seafaring – thus gives commerce its due, along with its subsequent Hamiltonian vision. Both Freneau and Brackenridge see commerce as the economic engine that drives higher culture. Brackenridge is blunt: Philadelphia, he says, “The seat of arts, of science, and of fame / Derives her grandeur from the pow’r of trade.” In Freneau, commerce, in a classical topos that survives in American poetry to Whitman and Stevens, summons the Muses from the Old World to the New, “The last, the best / Of countries, where the arts shall rise and grow, / And arms shall have their day.” Even the peace-loving Eugenio makes allowances for the necessity of military power. Both writers make the assumption that commerce is an urban affair, as opposed to agriculture, but neither dwells on the rural versus urban conflict that was later to become so contentious politically. Both writers tend to equate commerce with science, thus making way for an encomium on Franklin. If Freneau’s 1786 poem treats commerce less enthusiastically than the 1772 co-authored text, as Wertheimer claims (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 46/31), the rapprochement of the two authors is nonetheless closest on this point.

Leander’s reply to Eugenio hurries on to the future – “since we know the past” – and urges Acasto to unveil “the mystic scenes of dark futurity.” He urges a time when the “dreary wastes and awful solitude” of the supposedly empty hinterlands, “where Melancholy sits with eye forlorn” (Melancholy being prosopoeia for the hapless Indian), will be peopled by cultivated Europeans “from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores.” One is left uncertain whether Leander’s future is based on “reason from the course of things,” to use Brackenridge’s phrase, or an assumption of divine Providence. In Freneau’s poem, the two are inextricable. But his speech allows Acasto to venture his concluding prophecy, guarded in conditional syntax. Acasto is unconditional only in his certainty that the apocalyptic “trump of fame” will sound ruin to “all monarchy.” (The rousing anti-monarchism in the last four lines of Acasto’s speech is, of course, new in 1786 – after the Treaty of Paris but before Bastille.)

Before Acasto welcomes the New Jerusalem, however, Freneau allows the peaceable Eugenio a lengthy digression on the war atrocities of King George’s soldiers. Here Freneau vents his bitterness against the British. And it is true that most of the paternal anglophilia of his undergraduate poem has been systematically erased in this 1786 recension. But traces remain, and they speak to the mixed feelings Americans have carried about their Old World, Anglo-Saxon heritage ever since. Thus Eugenio catalogues the wrongs: from the murder of the 1770 Boston Massacre (singled out in Freneau’s footnote), to the use of foreign mercenaries, to the imputed demagoguery of Sir Francis Bernard, to every bloody violation of men, women, and children. But even as he speaks, we cannot forget his previous repeated emphasis on the Black Legend and British moral superiority to the Spanish, nor the valorization of the culture imported from the Old World, nor specific instances of British accomplishment like the heroic Wolfe or Newton, “Britannia’s sage.”

Acasto’s peroration on the coming New Jerusalem is unusually extended and detailed. Such allusion to the end of time is a commonplace rhetorical flourish to bring closure to such poems, and both Dwight’s and Trumbull’s rising glory poems conclude this way, but briefly, in no more than a line or two. Behind the rhetoric, of course, lies the American Puritan conviction that the New World would be the imminent site of the Second Coming. As Jonathan Edwards himself, in the final paragraph of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” had declared only a few decades earlier, “God seems now to be hastily gathering in his elect in all parts of the land; and probably the bigger part of adult persons that ever shall be saved, will be brought in now in a little time.” But Freneau’s passage plays the scene of Revelation for all its worth.

For contrast, a glance at Brackenridge’s concluding lines reveals a writer who employs the ready-made topos but systematically silences every biblical resonance:

This is thy praise America thy pow’r

Thou best of climes by science visited

By freedom blest and richly stor’d with all

The luxuries of life. Hail happy land

The seat of empire the abode of kings,

The final stage where time shall introduce

Renowned characters, and glorious works

Of high invention and of wond’rous art,

Which not the ravages of time shall wake

Till he himself has run his long career;

Till all those glorious orbs of light on high

The rolling wonders that surround the ball,

Drop from their spheres extinguish’d and consum’d;

When final ruin with her fiery car

Rides o’er creation, and all nature’s works

Are lost in chaos and the womb of night.

Brackenridge too sees the “rising glory” of America ending only with the extinction of the sun. But to him, the presiding spirits of history are “science” and “freedom,” and they will bring about “luxuries,” “empire,” “kings” (in his pre-Revolutionary imagination), “renownéd characters,” inventive technologies, and art. His driving forces are rational and political, undiluted (but for Apollo’s “fiery car”) by any mythology. His freedom is not a Puritan freedom to follow virtue, but utilitarian and unconditional. Only the Doomsday note of his final line seems out of key.

Freneau’s peroration, like Brackenridge’s, sees America as, in Silverman’s words, “not only the latest frontier of human questing, but also the last …, the end of the historical process” (Colonial American Poetry, 232). But Freneau is unwilling to let go of the Bible. His future America, like that of Edwards, will be home to “myriads of saints” throughout the Millennium, and the only king in sight will be “their immortal king.” Imagery from Revelation – itself reworked from the Hebrew scriptures, primarily Isaiah – mingles with phrases from Milton, as the lion and the lamb “in mutual friendship linked, shall browse the shrub”:

The happy people, free from toils and death,

Shall find secure repose. No fierce disease

No fevers, slow consumption, ghastly plague,

(Fate’s ancient ministers) again proclaim

Perpetual war with man: fair fruits shall bloom,

Fair to the eye, and sweeter to the taste;

Nature’s loud storms be hushed, and seas no more

Rage hostile to mankind – and, worse than all,

The fiercer passions of the human breast

Shall kindle up to deeds of death no more,

But all subside in universal peace. –

– Such days the world,

And such America at last shall have

When ages, yet to come, have run their round,

And future years of bliss alone remain.

Acasto’s vision represents a future America beyond the reach of “Fate’s ancient ministers,” or, in Susan Castillo’s phrase, “beyond the toils of history” (“Imperial Pasts,” 38), echoing the thesis first propounded many years ago by David Noble: that America has “a covenant that makes Americans a chosen people who have escaped from the terror of historical change” (Eternal Adam, ix). This final covenant, unlike the previous biblical covenants, is given unconditionally, with no possibility of breaking faith. The entire passage survives nearly intact from the 1772 text, apart from the final lines emphasizing Freneau’s hope for universal peace.

Freneau the incipient deist cannot yet bring himself to the dramatic moment reached by Joel Barlow one year later at the end of his Vision of Columbus (1787). There, Columbus, exalted by the visions shown to him, calls for the expected final Revelation:

Command, celestial Guide, from each far pole,

The blissful morn to open on my soul …

Let heaven, unfolding, ope the eternal throne,

And all the concave flame in one clear sun,

On clouds of fire, with Angels at his side,

The Prince of Peace, the King of Salem ride.

But his angelic mentor Hesperus emphatically refuses: “Enough for thee, that thy delighted Mind / Should trace the deeds and blessings of thy kind” (Barlow, Vision, Book 9, p. 254; Columbiad, Book 10, p. 336.). If Barlow explicitly refuses to show the coming of the Millennium, in Freneau’s mind the competing forces of reason and Providence, the categories of sacred and secular, remain muddled. Freneau’s 1786 poem is philosophically inconsistent. His thinking is more conflicted than the more purely Enlightenment minds of a Brackenridge or a Barlow. But it is therefore both more complex and more representative. It is the genius of “The Rising Glory of America” not only to hold these conflicting sentiments in suspension but to balance them in an aesthetically lucid design.

“The Rising Glory of America” is a landmark, one of the most fascinating American poems of its century. Yet both Freneau and his ambitious prophecy have disappeared from the view of all but period specialists. Selections from his work remain in anthologies, but I doubt if he is much taught. There has not been an edition of his poems since F.L. Pattee’s three-volume “complete” set of 1902 and Harry Hayden Clark’s substantial selection of 1927. Freneau’s name fails even to appear in the eight-hundred-page Columbia History of American Poetry.9 Yet Freneau’s work is broader in subject and more various in prosodic form than that of any preceding American poet, not to mention most of his nineteenth-century successors. He still gets tagged as a “pre-romantic,” or he is dismissed as a political hack. Freneau composed many poems ostensibly sympathetic to Native Americans – not only “The Indian Burying Ground” but ambitious dramatic monologues like “The Prophecy of King Tamany” and “The Dying Indian” – and in his prose he assumed the Noble Savage persona of “Tomo-Cheeki.” He also employed dramatic monologue satirically in “George the Third’s Soliloquy,” wrote the graveyard Gothic “The House of Night,” the mythically heroizing “Pictures of Columbus,” a vividly realistic portrait from life in “The British Prison Ship,” and an important group of deist poems at the end of his life, not to mention poems on his Caribbean experience, with their ferocious attacks on slavery. These are impressive performances indeed.