Philip Gould
The study of the political writing of the American Revolution has engaged historians and literary scholars since the late nineteenth century, when Moses Coit Tyler’s two‐volume The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 made a serious attempt to read carefully in the political literature of the American Revolution. Later, during the middle of the twentieth century, historians who told the story of a truly American Revolution organized the archive of printed political writing to demonstrate US national consensus and the ideologies through which that consensus supposedly was constructed. Historians of Revolutionary politics mined the pamphlet and newspaper literature for its political arguments and rhetorical capacities. Only later, during the 1970s and 1980s, as early American literary studies matured as a scholarly field, did these non‐belletristic and polemical works become the subject of literary studies, deserving of theoretical and textual analysis.
Since the 1980s the study of Revolutionary print culture has become an important subfield in early American literary studies, one characterized by considerations of such concepts as publicity and publication, oral performance, individual and collaborative modes of authorship, and the complex relation between print culture and political action. Though many of these subjects continue to shape the critical direction of the field, more recent developments in transatlantic and imperial studies have put pressure on traditional models of national consensus, which is particularly germane for this historical period when the US nation is being invented. There is now interest in developing new transatlantic literary and cultural contexts for the Revolution’s print culture, as well as in addressing relatively those groups resisting the Revolution, particularly the British American Loyalists. The field’s future would seem to suggest continued critical attention to transnational and even anti‐national writings. Yet our field also appears to be significantly affected by the current age of changing information technologies and virtual modes of communication. Not surprisingly, it is engaged with (and will likely continue to explore) the subjects of networks, communication, and the dissemination of political discourse at this moment of political transformation.
This essay focuses on literary genres that, until relatively recently, were never considered literary at all. Revolutionary political writing is an occasional and polemical literature; it is produced and circulated to shape public opinion by directly responding to political events like the Stamp Act or the Intolerable Acts, and, in many cases, to writers and writings of the opposition. It includes a wide range of genres, literary forms, and public media: political pamphlets, newspaper writings of all sorts printed and often reprinted in the colonies (and sometimes in Britain), political writings published in almanacs, published sermons, as well as an array of political petitions, declarations, and handbills and broadsides. Indebted to British literary forms and conventions, this literature of politics expresses itself in high and low forms of burlesque and parody, political satire, public letters, mock proposals and projects, dialogues, squibs, screeds, and invectives, among others. This writing most often did not identify individual (or collaborative) authors; though in many cases anonymous authorship was apparently tenuous and even a mere pose of political disinterest. These pseudonymous writers often responded in the most personal ways, testifying to their knowledge about the person behind the persona (as when, for example, “The Forester” and “Cato” – Thomas Paine and the Loyalist William Smith – attacked one another in the Philadelphia press over the arguments in Common Sense).
The 1760s and 1770s witnessed a massive expansion of printed materials about British American politics. Both the newspaper and pamphlet literature of politics increased dramatically during these tumultuous decades. In the first decade of the crisis, the number of colonial newspapers nearly doubled; in the middle 1770s there were 25 new newspapers started in New York alone, 22 in Pennsylvania, and eight in New Jersey (Amory and Hall 2000: 294, 261). Since the early eighteenth century colonial American newspapers had published writings about local, colonial, and imperial subjects, including political ones, often involving local elections, currency debates, and other points of controversy, as well as news from London. During the 1770s their political content rose dramatically, and they reprinted increasing amounts of “political” news from other colonial papers. This writing sometimes included work from canonical writers whom we forget were also read in this periodical medium. Parts of Mercy Otis Warren’s satiric closet dramas, for example, were printed in the Massachusetts Spy and Boston Gazette.
By the 1770s colonial newspapers began to more closely resemble the often bitter partisanship of political pamphlets. Whereas early printers like Benjamin Franklin had tried to avoid allying their papers with one political party, Revolutionary‐era ones were now forced to identify their papers – and themselves – with the patriotic movement, a change that unsettled traditional notions about the freedom of the press (discussed below). During the Revolutionary crisis pamphlet publication increased dramatically and, along with its oral transmission in social spaces like taverns and coffeehouses, played an important role in shaping public opinion. Book historians have noted that over 400 political pamphlets were printed and published in the colonies during this era. It was relatively cheap to print and distribute them locally, requiring only several printer’s sheets, which were folded and refolded to produce works anywhere from ten to eight pages in octavo or quarto. At times of heightened political tensions – the Stamp Act, Townshend duties, Boston Massacre, or formation of the Continental Congress, for example – pamphlets could be printed and published quickly, which was particularly important when such episodes let to a series of attacks and counterattacks in print. Pamphlets, too, like the newspaper, were a medium for reprinting. John Dickinson’s highly influential Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania was initially serialized in the Pennsylvania Chronicle and Universal Advertiser in 1767, reprinted widely in other newspapers, and soon published as a pamphlet in Philadelphia and elsewhere (McDonald 1999: xiii). We should see the pamphlet and newspaper as cross‐pollinating media highly aware of each other’s productions and legally and financially able to reproduce themselves during this period of political upheaval.
Modern literary scholarship has embraced the image of the American Revolution as a political event forged in print publication, where writing and ideas propelled the colonists toward political independence. Two famous remarks made by important historical figures about the causes of the Revolution are worth noting, since they are invoked, even today, by historians and literary scholars analyzing the role print culture played in shaping public opinion. David Ramsay’s summation in The History of the American Revolution (1789) has become something of a scholarly oracle: “In establishing American independence, the pen and the press had a merit equal to the sword.” John Adams similarly opined in a private letter, written in 1818: “But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their […] sentiments of their duties and obligations” (quoted in Ellis 1979: 103–104). This argument has such enormous critical influence because it tends to imagine our national revolution as a matter of principles rather than of violence, one of consent rather than coercion. If it enables us to conceptualize literature and politics coherently, it does so by also fortifying colonial‐national political unity. This is a neo‐Whig view of history, emphasizing the force of the “spirit of liberty” and, in this regard, we have taken the founders at their word.
Early interpretations of Revolutionary print culture, however, were rather skeptical about the processes by which the hearts and minds of the people were turned. Informed by the experience of two world wars and the development of the modern wartime state, those studies of the 1940s and 1950s were wary of political propaganda. This is certainly true of Philip Davidson’s (1941) landmark study of Revolutionary print culture, which is openly skeptical about political propaganda in the wake of World War I, where the US public presumably was misled by government propaganda. As a comprehensive study of Revolutionary political writing, Davidson’s constantly invokes contemporary history as the context through which to interpret and compare colonial American history, as when, for example, he likens William Livingston’s writing to “anti‐German propaganda of the World War” (Davidson 1941: 12). The demagogic politics Davidson describes arises from a larger cynicism about US democratic politics in his own age, a fact all the more pronounced as he invokes Walter Lippmann’s theories about the breakdown of the American public sphere (which he debated with the philosopher John Dewey in the 1920s). Davidson’s version of the Revolution ventriloquizes contemporary doubts about democracy in America.
During the 1940s and 1950s political developments continued to shape the historical study of Revolutionary newspapers and other forms of political media. Disillusioned with Soviet communism under Joseph Stalin, and with rational, utopian politics in general, American liberalism at this time aimed to recover what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “vital center” of political belief (1965: 209, 255 passim). If this conservative shift represented a kind of chastened realism, it registers itself in Schlesinger’s own seminal study of Revolutionary‐era newspapers, which, though highly nationalistic (that is, it’s a uniquely “American” Revolution), also reveals an underlying skepticism about mass culture and mass politics. Liberals like Schlesinger were both fascinated with and unsettled by this historical episode where popular media roused the American “masses” into political frenzy. As in Davidson’s study, Revolutionary print culture testifies to the “extraordinary skill” the Patriots showed “in manipulating public opinion” (Schlesinger 1965: 20). Schlesinger saw Revolutionary newspaper publication as a popular medium that exploits “the fact that ‘the bulk of mankind are more led their senses than by their reason’” (28).
Subsequent scholarship about Revolutionary print culture maintains the highly nationalist perspectives of the consensus historiography during the Cold War era. For decades, the argument about the Americanization of political discourse, and the capacity of popular media to create national unity, anchored this field. During the 1960s and 1970s there emerged from within this nationalist historiography new historical interpretations of the meaning and role of ideology during the Revolution. Informed by the methods of cultural anthropology and sociology, historians like Bernard Bailyn (1967) and Gordon S. Wood (1969) argued that republicanism constituted a set of political assumptions and principles that formed a cultural system – an ideology – through which American colonists interpreted events. What Wood called the “Whig science of politics” was a conspiratorial worldview that was structured according the crucial oppositions between virtue and corruption, selflessness and interests, and liberty and tyranny (1969: 3–45). Challenges by Joyce Appleby (1992) and other historians opposed this “republican synthesis” with an alternative narrative of the role of ideology, emphasizing the liberal dimensions of colonial America, which instead valued the rights of individuals, their personal freedom outside of civic duties, and a generally optimistic view of the progress of human societies.1
This brief summary does not do justice to the large and complex historiography of republicanism and liberalism, but it does begin to suggest both the possibilities and limitations it posed for early American literary studies. These competing and complementary ideologies provided important social and political contexts for major critical studies of eighteenth‐century literature in general and of Revolutionary political writing in particular (as I discuss below). While the debates over republicanism and liberalism produced a good deal of scholarship that was attentive to the political language of pamphlets and newspapers, it approached language as a largely transparent medium through which to argue over the character and content of the American Revolution.
This point is worth underscoring because it is related to disciplinary questions about the literary value of the literature of politics. This cohort of influential historians generally drew hard lines between the domains of literature and politics. No single scholar has done more for the study of political pamphleteering than the historian Bernard Bailyn, who edited the monumental Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (1965) and analyzed their historical significance in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). This seminal work identified pamphlets as “primarily political, not literary, documents” and debunked them as “remarkably bad” prose – “pallid, imitative, and crude” (1967: 8, 16, 12). The border Bailyn draws between literature and politics secures the pamphlet’s historical significance by emphasizing content over style. This critical move consigns it to a particular domain and thus preserves the category of American literature by acknowledging the political pamphlet’s literary deficiencies and contrasting it in this way with the highly professionalized achievements of British political writers like Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. This version of pamphleteering and the literature of Revolutionary politics makes “remarkably bad” prose the place from which to chart the later development of American literature.
Accordingly, traditional stories of early American literature, beginning with Puritans engaging theological and psychological problems in the New World and culminating with the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s, elided or dismissed a good deal of Revolutionary political writing. Those critical studies offering serious literary analysis of this writing were, as we have seen, operating under constraints about what qualifies as literature, and so they unsurprisingly emphasize the theme of patriotic consensus turned national unity. During these years this subfield emphasized “major” writers in pamphlet and newspaper publication – Francis Hopkinson, Philip Freneau, and Benjamin Franklin, for example – in order to make the case for a literary canon during this period (Elliott 1982; Shaw 1981). If this attempt to legitimize the field in literary terms is understandable (that is, finding a worthy canon to measure up to other fields and modern literary standards), its effect was to structure the literary field according to identifiable authors (even though most writings were published anonymously), and to produce a limited canon – patriotic, male, reasonably learned – of political writers Perhaps the best account of this era’s broadside, newspaper, and pamphlet literature, Bruce Granger’s Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (1960), avoids the narrowness of US nationalism by accounting seriously for anonymous publication, a wide swath of genres and media, and the English models for and Loyalist versions of satirical forms. Yet even this judicious approach, while placing British American writing in the context of English literary traditions and canonical models like Pope, Swift, and Charles Churchill, tends to make colonial American political writing coherent by identifying it with “neoclassicism.” This kind of “aesthetic uniformitarianism” emphasizes social rather than artistic needs and purposes, and thereby skirts the issue of literary quality by placing it in a derivative position (7–12).
By the early 1990s, influential scholarship was beginning to reformulate the relation between aesthetics and politics and to theorize new ways of understanding literary form, authorship, and the very meaning of language. Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth‐Century America (1990) critically adapted republicanism to literary studies, arguing that it should be understood as a “metadiscourse” that tied medium to political message. Informed by the methods of book history, Benedict Anderson’s theories of print capitalism and national formation, and especially Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, Warner argued influentially that republicanism functioned as a regimen of print publication, which prescribed the pure and abstract value of print, its ideally disinterested dissemination through the public sphere of political debate, and hence the impersonality of political authorship. Indeed the language of republicanism, its appearance in anonymous publications, made republican ideas (or ideology) possible: “Republican rhetoric and the discursive conditions of the public sphere rendered each other intelligible. In the very act of giving advice about liberty and power, the pamphlet provides the categories of its own utility” (65).
The public sphere of print quickly became a highly influential model for reading political writing (and other forms of discourse) during the eighteenth century. It too became subjected to equally important alterations and revisions. During the 1990s there followed studies of oratory and performance in early American culture that posed new models of subjectivity, authorship, and expression. In studies by Jay Fliegelman (1993) of the eighteenth‐century elocutionary revolution, by Christopher Looby (1996) of the US nation “voiced” into being, and by Sandra Gustafson (2000) of oratorical traditions, each offered distinctive versions of the importance of oral performance in Revolutionary American culture. Each provided alternative theoretical and historical contexts through which to understand the era’s assumptions about and protocols for political expression, emphasizing the primacy of performative expression and the embodied meanings of language. Fliegelman, for example, argued that the Declaration of Independence should be understood as a political script meant to be read aloud in order to legitimate its political message – its language – affectively. Addressing Warner’s argument about the impersonality of print culture, he countered that Revolutionary American print culture did not “stand apart from the politics of sincerity and authenticity” and accordingly understood that power could be invested in special persons identified by their “sensibility” (1993: 128–129).
Increasingly, then, the field has come to revise the Habermasian concept of the impersonal and disinterested public sphere and to accordingly articulate the often reciprocal and animating relation between print and manuscript media (a subject taken up below). We now recognize, for example, the importance of the publication of “private” letters in Revolutionary newspapers, a genre whose social and familial intimacies lent it greater – not compromised – credibility in print. For example, the famous “Letter from Jacob Duche written to General George Washington,” published in Benjamin Towne’s Loyalist‐leaning Pennsylvania Evening Post on 13 December 1777, shows the political potential of a private correspondence “intended only for the view of the gentleman to whom it was confidently addressed” (“Letter” 1777). Yet if this makes Fliegelman’s point about the importance of sensibility to individual expression, we should also recognize that the so‐called private letter was often written for public consumption in the first place.
Since the 2000s the field generally has embraced synthetic models of the relation between print and oral expression. Notwithstanding the many revisions to Warner’s (1990) argument, his theorization of print and politics – the idea that literary form and political ideology were historically coherent – did influence subsequent reconsiderations of the Revolutionary literature of politics. This scholarship began to focus on a number of related critical issues: the “literary” quality of occasional and anonymously published political writing; new theoretical approaches to aesthetics and politics; and Revolutionary print culture as part of complex eighteenth‐century cultures of performance. These changes were especially significant for connecting politics to other kinds of writings and cultural discourses, for recognizing the fluidity of print and manuscript media, and for further exploring eighteenth‐century conceptions of political discourse. Political writing became an important site for the field to engage larger issues about language and signification. (Recall that in Federalist 37 James Madison, following Locke, notes the inevitable arbitrariness of language, an observation in keeping with modern linguistic theory.) Perhaps most importantly, the field was successful in dispelling stereotypes of the Age of Reason and, especially in the work of Fliegelman (1993) and Gustafson (2000), recuperating much broader transnational cultural contexts for political discourse.
The critical debates over print and oral expression registered new ways of thinking about the formal designs and value of the literature of politics. This attention was long overdue in light of the abundant evidence in Revolutionary pamphlets and newspapers of the value much of this writing placed on literary style. Indeed, political writing often directly addressed the subject of writing – matters of style, form, and expression – as the measure of the writer’s political credibility. During the print wars over Common Sense, for example, the Presbyterian minister – and important critic of rhetoric and oratory – John Witherspoon, writing as “Aristides” in the Pennsylvania Packet in 1776, complained bitterly that Loyalists like “Cato” were guilty of degrading the quality of newspaper prose, and the printers and editors republishing these attacks were even more culpable for forcing such hackneyed stuff on newspaper subscribers. In the 1990s and 2000s the field accordingly addressed the rhetorical complexities of the political discourse published in broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers; these media and genres increasingly qualified as “literature” and hence suitable for the skills and methods of literary analysis.
Robert Ferguson’s The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1997) was an important critical milestone for such an investigation. His analysis of the literature of Revolutionary politics dissects and examines the most prominent literary qualities of political writing, those involving matters of voice, tone, style, and diction. The revolutionary text, according to Ferguson, is characterized by a number of salient features: it deploys the language of American unity; it insidiously and then radically cuts the cable of the traditions of time and history connecting North American colonies to Britain; it often seizes the Protestant high ground of rhetorical prophecy; it recognizes the rhetorical necessity of compression and elision; it psychologically weans British subjects from their wonted identification with and dependence on British authority; it skillfully employs an array of tones ranging from self‐controlled reason to apocalyptic outrage in order to address varying crises and audiences. In subsequent scholarship, moreover, Ferguson has urged the field to account for the “lost genre [of] the political pamphlet,” and, in discussing Common Sense, goes so far as to reimagine “the relation of ephemeral political pamphlet to timeless literary work” (2000: 465, 470).
This formal turn both accounts for a more expansive understanding of “literature” in the late eighteenth century – which extended well beyond the belletristic genres – and further unveils the formal complexities of political writing. Yet it is also worth emphasizing that if this critical development further opened up the literature of politics to literary methods of analysis, it did so according to a traditional, nationalist framework of US literary history. Certainly, it was informed by the assumptions underlying Benedict Anderson’s influential theories about print capitalism and imagined communities. Even the most original work in the field was generally anchored in nationalist critical narratives. “Nations are not born, but made,” as one puts it, “And they are made, ineluctably, in language” (Looby 1996:1). This approach had the inevitable effect of emphasizing the growing differences between British and American literature and thereby “Americanizing” the literary production of British America: As Ferguson concludes, “the underlying sources of difference between England and America in these years” are registered audibly (if often anxiously) in writings by colonials who feel their difference from the “Mother Country” but cannot fully admit it: “The pamphlet literature of the period is a sign of largely unrealized cultural differences and a neglected gauge, today, for measuring the range of those differences” (Ferguson 1997: 97). This approach is understandable, as I suggested above, in light of professional and institutional pressures: the national perspective helps legitimize this writing by situating it (and canonizing it) within US literary history.
For the past two decades, transatlantic and hemispheric methods have put pressure on this critical narrative of the rise and development of US national literature. As opposed to the colonies‐to‐nation story, which traditionally emphasizes the Revolution as a crucial watershed for the transformation of British subjects to American citizens, transnational methods have refocused the field on Anglo‐American cultural identities and discourses. In Revolutionary studies this accounts for the vital role of the British empire as the organizing rubric for colonial experience, and particularly for the transatlantic flow of American culture. These relatively new perspectives have uncovered the extent to which British Americans (and early nationals) continued to be shaped by metropolitan cultural mores and literary models. Being “colonial” even at a time of political revolution did not suddenly cut off transatlantic culture. Important work has shown, for example, the ways in which British Americans valued forms of wit and sociability reflected in local institutions and practices (Shields 1997); the diasporic nature of American culture that before and after the Revolution reformulated what it meant to be “English” on this side of the Atlantic (Tennenhouse 2007); the self‐conscious adaptations of colonial and early national writing that makes late colonial American literature look like creative distortions of British canonical models (Giles 2001; Spengemann 1994); and the cultural and literary expressions of “American Anglophilia” that endured well into the antebellum era (Tamarkin 2007).
These critical developments have been far‐reaching and influential; and if they are in keeping with transnational and hemispheric movements in American literary studies as a whole, they also have specific ramifications for understanding Revolutionary print culture. At the time of the Revolution, British American writing was thoroughly enmeshed in transatlantic routes of cultural exchange and highly self‐conscious about metropolitan English culture. The study of transatlantic book history, moreover, further belies the Americanization thesis of the Revolution. Colonial patterns of consumption, and of English books (as well as Irish and Scottish reprints) in particular, strongly suggest that at the time of the Revolution the British American colonies were becoming more like Britain. Histories of the book look to particular features of the transatlantic book trade to make such an argument: late colonial patterns of book importations, sales, and reprints; evidence from advertisements in colonial newspapers and periodicals; inventories and accounts, and commercial records of printers and booksellers; subscription lists and records of lending libraries. The London book market continued to play a major role in British American culture through the Revolution and well into the nineteenth century. By 1770, for example, Britain was exporting more books each year to the American colonies than to all of Europe; and between 1700 and 1785, almost half of British print exports went to British America and the British West Indies (Botein 1981; Raven 1997). “London bookstores” appeared in eighteenth‐century Boston and New York. Some of the most important emigrant printers and booksellers, like Robert Bell (the Philadelphia “provedore to the sentimentalists” whose book auctions were famous) and James Rivington (who advertised himself as the only “London bookseller” in the colonies, and who also published an important Loyalist newspaper in New York), succeeded because they were able to market themselves as worldly impresarios of English culture (Green 1999).
These cultural developments did not suddenly disappear during or after the Revolution. In the past decade the field has increasingly recognized the ways in which even the most patriotic writing during the 1760s and 1770s was shaped by English literary and cultural traditions. Critical revisions of nationalist narratives have proceeded along a variety of theoretical and historical approaches. One method is to dialogically pair British American writers with English luminaries in order to articulate the transatlantic literary conversations as well as disruptions, refractions, and insurrections that occur in eighteenth‐century American poetry (Giles 2001). Another visualizes the British American diaspora as a new model for understanding British American writing that imagines new, and improved, ways of establishing one’s English cultural standing (Tennenhouse 2007). Yet another emphasizes the disjuncture between political and cultural identifications in Revolutionary America and shows how and why Patriots and Loyalists each managed – and leveraged – English literary culture to rhetorically establish political positions in print (Gould 2013). These kinds of reconsiderations of Revolutionary print culture put the political and cultural revolutions into a complex relation and articulate the dissonances between them; they belie the colonies‐to‐nation model of American literary history and resist making the Revolution the moment when British American culture and literature suddenly became “American.”
Revolutionary pamphleteering and newspaper writing were immersed in English culture as demonstrated by abundant textual and historical evidence: literary authorities, allusions, quotations, and epithets; booksellers’ advertisements of the latest imports and reprints of British books; and the languages of a transatlantic culture of taste, wit, and civility. During the Stamp Act crisis, for example, the Patriots Stephen Hopkins and James Otis and Rhode Island Loyalists attacked one another over the normal political issues of English liberties, the rights of Americans, and the nature and scope of Parliament’s sovereignty. They often waged these rhetorical attacks via English literary authorities like James Thomson, Edward Young, and the Augustan wits. In 1774 Alexander Hamilton and the Loyalist Samuel Seabury argued bitterly in a pamphlet exchange over the Continental Congress and the Articles of Association; they attacked one another’s literary and critical knowledge about the meanings of wit and ridicule, and each turned to Samuel Johnson as the final authority on these subjects. The most important patriotic pamphlet before Common Sense, John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767), cited Alexander Pope to remind colonial readers not to be seduced into accepting political terms that would do harm to the colonies. Despite the abundant evidence for the transatlantic cultural production of American political discourse, however, the field still clings to a fairly narrow set of important American political writers, largely because they continue to make a place for early American political writing in the American canon. Even the most innovative scholarship tends to reconsider the usual suspects of the patriotic political canon: the verse and prose satires of John Trumbull, Philip Freneau, and Francis Hopkinson, or, on the Loyalist side, the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (Elliott 1982; Silverman 1987). The field thus remains invested in the traditional model of the “author” and is just beginning to explore the extensive archive of anonymous writings, the relationship between authors and printers, and the use of manuscript media for political writing, where women poets and diarists were more prominent than they were in print.
Transatlantic perspectives have inspired new critical attention to the British American Loyalists. This addresses a significant critical elision lasting from the 1950s to the near present. It is notable that the Loyalists figure more prominently in Moses Coit Tyler’s Literary History of the American Revolution (1897) than they do in traditional or even more recent accounts of Revolutionary print culture. This is not surprising, as I suggested above, insofar as American literary and historical studies in the highly nationalistic Cold War era, and institutional and disciplinary pressures produced consensus histories and theories of “American” culture and character. But it is notable that even the most innovative – and often revisionist – accounts of Revolutionary literature and culture place Loyalist political writing to the margins (if considering it at all). The possibility of viewing the Revolution as simultaneously a “rebellion” did not unsettle the field from its consistent focus on the language of the origins of the US nation. While some studies acknowledge the Loyalist pamphleteering or political satire of accomplished figures like Samuel Seabury or Jonathan Odell, they simply do not fit the prevailing paradigms of “Revolutionary” politics and writing. By means of synecdoche and circular logic, the Patriots stand in for the whole of American political discourse.
The study of the British American Loyalists disrupts some of the most influential critical paradigms shaping the field over the past decades (Gould 2013; Larkin 2007). Loyalist pamphlets, broadsides, and newspapers, and the political essays, squibs, parodies, verse satires, mock proposals, and histories of the rebellion all present a far different set of ideological assumptions and discursive protocols – and pressures – shaping political expression. Perhaps most importantly, Loyalist political writing challenges the idealized image of the print public sphere as a place of the free and rational exchange of ideas. Through Loyalist perspectives and experiences print culture itself is far more dangerous and coercive. Recent important work on patriotic publication questions the pristine image of the public sphere valuing the res publica and popular consent. Howell (2011), for example, argues for the importance of alternative print media of blank forms, handbills, and ephemera revealing “inarticulacy, localization, and coercion” (191). Even the most ingenious theories of Revolutionary expression and persuasion, such as Fliegelman’s notion of the “soft compulsion” Revolutionary performance enacts (1993: 35–62), looks to be a misleading abstraction in the face of historical evidence of censorship, intimidation, and violence. In New York, for example, Samuel Seabury was placed under house arrest for writing the West Chester Farmer pamphlets attacking Congress. In Maryland, the minister Jonathan Boucher was threatened at gunpoint in the streets and was forced to carry a pistol into church to preach.
Loyalist dissent represents attitudes and discourses that resist recent scholarship about the “Revolutionary” text. The literary characteristics of this writing about the American Rebellion are shaped more by the brutal realities of political coercion. Loyalist pamphlets and newspaper writing have a more strained and finally alienated relation to the “people.” At a time when everyday life was becoming highly politicized – as committees of safety invaded homes and warehouses and intercepted private letters – Loyalist political writing attempts to narrow rather than expand the sphere of politics. If Loyalists shared with Patriots the overall suspicion of the dangerous elasticity of language, their writing becomes shrill as political events turn toward independence; they do not, moreover, as the Patriots do, capitalize upon the enabling ambiguities of language. Whatever prophetic strains one finds in Loyalist language, this is nothing like an “American Jeremiad,” to use Sacvan Bercovitch’s famous formulation (1978). Political expression gradually, and then swiftly, is written less for shaping public opinion and more for reaffirming immediate social cohesion among like‐minded subjects loyal to the Crown. This, in turn, confounds the presumed differences between print and manuscript forms of publication, where privately shared works are unexpectedly printed and Loyalist printed works often look as if they are written for smaller, familiar audiences. Loyalist print culture looks more anxious, precarious, outraged, repressed, and increasingly desperate.
The Loyalists also alter our notions about the relation between consent and coercion. The principle of the “freedom of the press” is particularly important – and problematic. Long ago, Leonard Levy’s Legacy of Suppression (1960) posed an important revision of the Revolutionary founders, emphasizing their widespread practices of censorship and suppression of dissenting viewpoints at home. Subsequent accounts of the meaning of a free press in Revolutionary America, however, generally were aligned with the historiography of republicanism and exculpated patriotic censorship. The Patriots, in other words, were directed by Whig ideological assumptions: “A free press was supposed to make common cause against oppression, and the patriots would not have it perverted to the uses of power, wisely preferring the substance of liberty to the slogans” (Buell 1981: 81). This argument is in keeping with larger narratives of the evolution of rights in early America (with a particular eye on the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights). Although it usefully reminds us that modern liberal ideas about free expression were gradually developing during the Revolutionary era, it also tends to elide or euphemize the extensive record of patriotic intimidation and repression against Loyalist newspaper printers like James Rivington and Robert Bell. Each publicly pleaded for forbearance and cited Cato’s Letters and a long history of British liberties to defend publishing pieces opposing independence or simply trying to calm colonial passions. A Connecticut band of Sons of Liberty raided Rivington’s printing shop in New York City, for example, and destroyed his press. (Rivington later returned as the King’s printer of Rivington’s Royal Gazette.) In the face of such numerous episodes, the nationalist narrative of the freedom of the press looks more complicated, indeed compromised. The Loyalist presence in the history of Revolutionary print culture thus serves more than inclusiveness or critical parity; it presents multiple, conflicting perspectives on crucial historical and theoretical concepts, often demystifying them as functions of changing forms of power and political authority.
What, then, are the current paradigms and future directions for the study of Revolutionary print culture? In the remainder of the essay I explore four trajectories for future study. First, the historical methods and perspectives of book history and transatlantic print culture are likely to continue to shape this field. One of the intriguing issues that criticism is just beginning to address involves the question of the status and role of authorship in Revolutionary writing. When and how did the “modern” author – the proprietary individual or creative “genius” that Michel Foucault famously theorizes in “What is an Author?” (1979/1984) – emerge in early American literary history? Certainly, scholarship since the 1990s has been addressing this issue, though often elliptically. As I have discussed above, the critical debates over print and oral cultures in Revolutionary America often turned on the place (or deliberate absence) of the individualized author. Warner’s (1990) and Fliegelman’s (1993) accounts of political expression offer stridently different conceptions of what it meant to be an author in the 1760s and 1770s. Ferguson’s (1997) discussion of the Declaration, moreover, shows just how drastically the notions of literary originality and plagiarism changed between the time Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and his latter days in the 1820s when his political enemies were disparaging the work’s borrowings and antecedents.
The study of Revolutionary print culture now offers more thoughtful analysis about the complex and sometimes antagonistic relations between writers (or inchoate “authors”) and printers. This kind of analysis follows the methods of book history and is beginning to flesh out questions of authorship that involve consideration of the social and material conditions of print publication, the histories of British and British American copyright law, and transatlantic comparisons of colonial and British trade practices. Just as Foucault articulated the “author function,” the field seems to be moving toward the conception of a “printer function” in Revolutionary America. The infamous public dispute between Thomas Paine and Robert Bell, who printed and published the first edition of Common Sense, over who had the right to issue the second edition (as Paine was leaving Bell and taking the work he believed he owned to the Bradfords to print) has been a historical touchstone for this issue of print publication (Everton 2005; Gould 2013). The field continues to engage the many contradictions surrounding the roles of writers and printers and to recognize the collaborative nature of print production during this transitional era. This puts pressure on and opens possibilities for continued consideration of the history of authorship. For example, in this era where political writers were often anonymous (though sometimes known) and seldom paid for their work, why does so much political writing, on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides, directly attack the “author” for misguided interpretation, insidious deceit, and stylistic failure? Such a question has only begun to produce further considerations of the aesthetic standards and concerns of political writing and of the medium of newspaper and pamphlet as the site of competing ideologies of authorship.
Second, these methods have changed and likely will continue to change our understanding of political writing’s reception as well as its production. As more scholarship traces transatlantic histories of printing and reprinting (and piracy) and the complex and itinerant textual lives many of these pamphlets and newspaper publications experienced, we will increasingly understand the “meaning” of political writings in context of imperial‐commercial contexts as well as local readerships. Recent scholarship openly departs from traditional practices of reading political texts for their ideological dispositions – specifically regarding the importance of republicanism and liberalism – and instead looks closely at the social and cultural reception of texts, especially of British American reprints of British works. Eric Slauter has not only acknowledged the “trade gap” between historians’ and literary critics’ use of each other’s scholarship but also urged the field to focus on the local, mediating conditions of reception that shape the meanings of texts. The literature of politics must be seen “from the vantage point of consumers as well as producers, to consider local rather than national contexts of circulation, to examine the marketplace of revolution as well as the marketplace of print,” and thereby finally recognize “the braided histories of the book and of political thought” (Slauter 2010: 335).
Third, a development that likely will continue to shape the field involves the study of networks and communication practices. This is partly due to the information revolution in which we, as literary scholars, find ourselves in the twenty‐first century. Some of the most important work will actually historicize itself in light of the digital age of producing and disseminating information. Approaching the “Enlightenment” through its media and forms of representation, for example, William Warner’s study of patriotic communication networks in the 1770s reconsiders the reasons for their success in manipulating their own information age. “What led to this remarkable dissolution of British power?” he asks: the answer lies in “the new practices of association, communication, and generic invention” they developed (Warner 2013: 2–3).
Warner’s analysis of their masterful control of the dissemination of political discourse follows the proceedings of town meetings and other extra‐legal forms of association, the documents they produced, particularly the new genre of the “public declaration,” and the subsequent role printers, editors, political operatives, and many others played in spreading and managing information. This involves an array of political writing and colonial activities and focuses primarily on Massachusetts Bay and the production and networking of The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston (1772). The New England Sons of Liberty were the most adept at adapting the “protocols” of political discourse to their own immediate objectives. If this approach revisits some of the basic premises of the field (which reach back to John Adams’s famous assessment of the “real” revolution), its methods and insights have the virtue of reading across elite and popular social boundaries, and avoiding the “top‐down” model of intellectual and cultural histories of the Enlightenment. It also provides a more expansive picture than what Warner sees as the “single‐channel approaches to a media study of the Revolution” (2013: 25).
This concept of “protocols of liberty” finds its counterpart in Russ Castronovo’s reconsideration of Revolutionary “propaganda.” Castronovo prefers the term “printscape” to “print culture,” since it captures the dynamic, contingent, and often chaotic nature of the production and travel of political writing: the public sharing (or theft) of private letters, pirated editions of American and British works, intercepted and published texts, and the many redacted, distorted, or simply forged materials promoting the patriotic cause. WikiLeaks becomes the context, in Castronovo’s analysis, for rethinking Benjamin Franklin’s leaking of Thomas Hutchinson’s letters attacking the Sons of Liberty. As in Warner’s study, meaning lies in the mediation and movement of political writing. The “fluid” and “irregular” shape of the printscape involved the activities of writers, printers, and plagiarists, confounding the boundary between manuscript and print media, dispersing authorship, and constructing “a potentially revolutionary form of political agency that had little use for familiar notions of identity itself” (Castronovo 2014: 7, 41). Informed by Walter Benjamin’s theories about the democratic ideal of revolutionary writing, where readers actively become involved in the production of texts and ideas associated with them, Castronovo argues against the anachronistic model of individual authorship and instead for an American propaganda “that establishes not originality but replication as an engine of dissent” (78).
Rather than mining pamphlets and newspapers for their ideological content, these innovative studies approach meaning through mediation, and they resituate texts in ways that Slauter (2010) also points us, in the social and material realities in which they move. Yet for all of their methodological innovation and conceptual innovation, they still uncannily reveal the hold that “Whig” ideas still have on the field. Warner’s study, for instance, conceives of the unity that patriotic political discourse forges through the language of liberty and freedom. Although his analysis is informed by actor network theory’s concept of the “assemblage,” it nevertheless sounds a lot like traditional assessments of how the nation was born in the 1770s. The Boston Sons of Liberty manage networks of communication to create “unanimity” in the colony; the Boston Committee of Correspondence becomes “an engine of local consensus building”; the Patriots understand that “only by producing a new concentration of shared power could liberty be secured” (Warner 2013: 16, 25, 29). This version of Whig consensus seems somewhat overdrawn in light of Adams’s estimation that only a third of Americans actively supported the independence movement – and a third actively opposed it. Castronovo’s approach should be credited for retheorizing propaganda as something more complicated and dispersed than the state‐sponsored control about which Lippmann and Davidson were wary during the interwar years. Yet he too elides some of the more politically violent means by which the admittedly fluid and chaotic “printscape” operated. His is the more skeptical version of Whig analysis: like the revolutionaries themselves, he is highly self‐conscious about the fragility of language and its capacity for distortion and manipulation.
Fourth, and finally, I am struck by the continued, sometimes startling conceptual innovations of the field and equally by the limitations of some of its sacred premises. If we have critically transformed the concepts of print culture, performance, authorship, and reception, we also have generally hewed closely to the patriotic narrative of the American Revolution. This is understandable (for reasons I have discussed above), though critically lamentable. Even the most intriguing work on the Revolution as a moment shaped by its own historical forces of media, networking, and the dissemination of information are focused on the Sons of Liberty and committees of correspondence. By accounting for the political discourse of the “losers,” the field is not simply giving due respect or canonical quotas to Loyalist writing and writers but rather offering new and often distinctive historical models with which to think about literary production, cultural performance, and influential categories like “performance” and the “public sphere.” It also opens up more serious consideration of the political writings “published” in manuscript (often for reasons of censorship and repression), a medium distinct from print and yet one whose complementary and reciprocal relations with print are just beginning to be fully explored, as Castronovo does compellingly at times in Propaganda 1776).
In doing so, the field also will begin to remedy the obviously androcentric perspective that has shaped it since the 1950s – and one, I may add, that is starkly apparent in this chapter. In some respects, this admittedly derives from the historical fact that Revolutionary print culture, pamphleteering, and newspaper publication were largely male enterprises. The closet dramas published by Mercy Warren, and the important periodical essays of Judith Sargent Murray during the 1780s, are more the exception than the rule; so too are the early Maryland printers and editors Anne Catherine Green and Mary Katherine Goddard. By opening up Revolutionary literary studies to the Loyalists, however, we are also accounting for a good deal of important political writing by Loyalist women that circulated in manuscript. Although some of this was printed – one might think of Phillis Wheatley as a major poet on the Loyalist side of the conflict – much of these letters, diaries, and poetry remained in manuscript. Its relevance today lies mostly in essays and book chapters by historians of early American women, as well as important anthologies such as Catherine Blecki and Karin Wulf’s Milcah Martha Moore’s Book (1997), a compendium of “private” poems and journal entries by prominent women writers in Philadelphia and the Delaware River Valley. The field needs a full‐length study of the political writings by women, both published and in manuscript, and encompassing a spectrum of locales, social groups, and political affiliations.
Blecki and Wulf’s volume points to the potential recalibrations the field likely will undergo as it engages women’s political writing in manuscript, particularly Loyalist women’s writing, which felt the dual pressures of gender and political affiliation that impeded publication. But accounting for such writing is not simply a matter of inclusion in early American canons; as literary critics, the skills of close reading, theorization, and historical contextualization we bring to women’s political writing put pressure on the ideological and aesthetic features we have generally attributed to print and manuscript cultures as distinctive arenas of political expression. One of the values of Castronovo’s study is to articulate the movement and overlap of these two worlds of writing (often against the writer’s knowledge or consent). The Quaker Loyalist Hannah Griffitts’s political poems, circulated in manuscript and collected in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book, are as politically astute and formally complex as those produced by her more famous male counterparts on each side of the conflict, such as Jonathan Odell and Philip Freneau. One of her accomplished political poems, “Wrote by the same upon reading a Book entitled Common Sense. Jany. 1776,” flies in the face of theories of the private nature of women’s manuscript performances.
Griffitts’s attack on Common Sense (1776) begins: “The Vizars drop’d, see Subtily prevail, / Thro’ ev’ry Page of this fallacious Tale” (Blecki and Wulf 1997: 255). Its enlightened yet dismayed political voice, the urgency of its tone, the need to make visible the furtive conspiracies of patriotic censorship and intimidation, the overall complaint about the loss of English liberties: all of these features are characteristic of Loyalist poetics – even those works that made their way into print, usually in newspapers. The poem goes on to figure Paine as the biblical serpent, and, from there, to consider the horrible irony of the loss of free expression and an “impartial Press” publishing the free exchange of political views based on one’s “Conscience” (Blecki and Wulf 1997: 256). It also parodies the prophetic design of patriotic verse by warning about the imminent peril of enslavement, and also by ironically inverting the oppressors/oppressed opposition to make the patriotic movement appear as the real force of violence and censorship. Poetry like Griffitts’s productively urges us to continue to examine and reexamine the media and social contexts through which Revolutionary political writing was produced and disseminated and to continue to query the relation between “public” and “private” spheres we still tend to associate with print and manuscript cultures. In this case, it also points us toward an important and as yet under‐analyzed corpus of Revolutionary political discourse that never saw print publication.
See also: chapter 14 (benjamin franklin); chapter 24 (founding documents).