III.

The War of Independence and After

The flowering of American thought between the accession of George III in 1760 and the creation in 1789 of a federal government is notable in intellectual history.

A.

Revolutionary Period

The writings of the American statesmen of the period deserve to be read, as the Literary History of the American Revolution (1897) by the historian Moses Coit Tyler makes evident. Better known to the modern reader is the famous series of papers known as The Federalist, written in 1787-1788 by the statesmen John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, whose defence of the new United States Constitution still offers one of the most persuasive arguments on behalf of constitutional government.

Although American literature did not achieve full maturity in the 18th century, its scope was at least widened. The first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, appeared in Boston in 1690; its one edition was suppressed by colonial authorities because it did not have a licence. Fourteen years later the journalist John Campbell founded the Boston News-Letter. The first magazines appeared in 1741 in Philadelphia, when the printer Andrew Bradford founded the American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin established his General Magazine and Historical Chronicle.

Towards the end of the century, several notable literary personalities emerged amid the tumult of the American War of Independence, particularly the propagandist Thomas Paine, whose pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and the 12 issues of Crisis (1776-1783) awakened American enthusiasm for independence. Paine, however, lost favour in America when he published in London The Age of Reason (1794-1796), which argued against Christianity—but also against atheism. An important political satire was the mock epic M’Fingal (1775-1782) by the lawyer and poet John Trumbull. The most versatile and sensitive poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose “The House of Night” (1779) was a powerful exercise in Gothic Romanticism and whose nature poetry is still read.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789, London), regarded as the fullest and most penetrating account of an 18th-century black man’s life, was the first published autobiography by a black American. It is attributed to Olaudah Equiano, a slave who bought his freedom, settled in England, and afterwards became active in the antislavery movement.

B.

Postrevolutionary Period

During the administration of President George Washington one literary centre of the new nation was Hartford, Connecticut, where a group of young writers, including the clergyman Timothy Dwight and the poets John Trumbull and Joel Barlow, became known as the Hartford Wits. They wrote in many forms, including the epic, but only their lighter verse is still read. Of greater later significance was the emergence at this time of the American novel, as exemplified by The Power of Sympathy (1789), a sentimental work by the writer William Hill Brown, and Modern Chivalry (1792-1815) by the poet and novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a realistic and satirical account of frontier manners. The romances of the novelist and journalist Charles Brockden Brown, which were popular in Europe, included Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). Strange compounds of Gothic terror and pseudo-science, they are precursors to the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.