Poetry Wars - Colin Wells Early American Studies

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      Ten thousand Indians, who shall yell,

      And foam and tear, and grin and roar,

      And drench their maukesins in gore;

      To these I’ll give full scope and play

      From Ticonderoge to Florida;

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      If after all these lovely warnings,

      My wishes and my bowels yearnings,

      You shall remain as deaf as adder,

      Or grow with hostile rage the madder,

      I swear by George and by St. Paul

      I will exterminate you all.

      By the end of the poem, Burgoyne is more than ridiculous: he is a profoundly hateful character who delights in his capacity to terrorize readers by exploiting their fears of Indian “savagery,” and who identifies personally with such brutality, as indicated by his final, cold-blooded threat to exterminate an entire population should it attempt to oppose him. If, as one historian puts it, the original proclamation was sufficiently ill-conceived in tone and message as to breed “a passion to stop him,” Livingston’s versification reinforced that passion, such that the two documents, which were frequently reprinted in succession, would combine to shape the popular narrative of the campaign that would take hold after Burgoyne’s defeat.7 At the same time, the fullness of this narrative becomes even more recognizable when the works are read not as a simple satiric tit for tat but as part of a larger chronological unfolding of interrelated texts, beginning in the weeks preceding the battle and concluding with the dispatches from the battle lines as they were being reported.

      The first important intersection of poetry and news involved Livingston’s initial publication of the parody in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet at the end of August 1777. Following the appearance of Burgoyne’s original proclamation a week earlier in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and at the same moment numerous writers were commenting on Burgoyne’s arrogance and penchant for savagery, Livingston—identifying himself only as “A New-Jersey Man”—submitted the parody with a request that the editor print “the following Version of the most bombastic production that British insolence has hitherto exhibited.” Remarkably, another text appears farther down the same page—also by Livingston, and also a proclamation—“By his Excellency WILLIAM LIVINGSTON, Esquire, Governor, Captain General and Commander in Chief in and over the State of New-Jersey …,”8 which prohibited the granting of passports from Patriot-controlled New Jersey to British-occupied New York, expressly to prevent espionage. In the context of the ongoing struggle among competing authoritative documents, this juxtaposition is significant. It suggests, first and foremost, that Livingston found nothing contradictory about employing a proclamation to control the movement of people in his own jurisdiction while on the other hand undermining similar commands by a rival authority. Indeed, it is reasonable to conclude that he conceived the two forms as serving complementary functions, with his literary endeavor aiding and extending his political goals as New Jersey’s commander in chief. Through the publication of these companion documents, he established a pattern of conflating war and literary war that would be replicated throughout the Revolution.

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      At the same time, the notion that Livingston’s versification could be understood as an agent in the war effort becomes clearer when both works are read in the context of their republication in one newspaper in particular, the New-York Journal, and the General Advertiser, which, largely by accident, found itself in the position of being the first to report the news of the battle and of Burgoyne’s surrender. Though the paper’s editor, John Holt, had spent more than a decade publishing his avowedly Whig paper in New York City, in the wake of the British occupation he fled northward, eventually reviving the Journal in the summer of 1777 in the village of Kingston, New York—nearer to Saratoga than any other Patriot newspaper, and thus fortuitously situated to report on the status of Burgoyne’s advance. Before long, Holt’s dispatches, bearing the dateline “Kingston,” were providing the earliest word on the unfolding action. Such dispatches, in turn, both informed and were informed by the Journal’s concurrent reprinting of Burgoyne’s proclamation and Livingston’s versification.9

      Holt reprinted Burgoyne’s original proclamation on September 1, in the same issue that reported news of the first major setbacks in Burgoyne’s plans, the defeat of Lt. Col. Barry St. Leger at Fort Stanwix and the loss of more than nine hundred men at the Battle of Bennington. Holt reported that there was reason to believe that “the enemy lost a greater number of men than the public have yet been informed,” such that the local people have begun to “recover their spirits, and many are moving back into their former habitations.” The juxtaposition between the two pieces provided the first hint of tension between Burgoyne’s overconfident pronouncements and the reality on the ground. One week later, the paper led with Livingston’s versification on page 1, which, when read in the light of the previous issue’s increasing optimism that Burgoyne’s advance might be impeded by attrition, served at once to diminish anxiety over Burgoyne’s military advantage and to reinforce, through the characterization of Burgoyne, the moral imperative of defeating him. In the issues that followed, Holt updated his dispatches, reporting that Burgoyne was hemmed in near Stillwater and short of supplies, and then finally, in the issue of October 13, he printed a “letter from the Northward,” which predicted what had once seemed impossible: “In a few days, I think Burgoyne will be entirely surrounded.” Four days later, Burgoyne’s soldiers surrendered.10

      In this interplay between verse and prose, literature and news, all in the fluid context of an ongoing military campaign, one glimpses the degree to which a poem could seem to transcend the “merely” literary to emerge as an agent in the historical process. Within the narrative logic of the print public sphere—in which events reported as news appeared alongside other texts in a system of mediation that unfolded temporally—such a timely publication as Livingston’s could appear as one of a series of events leading inexorably toward the specific outcome of Burgoyne’s defeat. In the aftermath of the surrender, the act of unmasking Burgoyne’s claim to military dominance could be read as narrative foreshadowing in a story of cosmic retribution against British arrogance. As a poem that lent moral and ideological weight to this narrative, moreover, Livingston’s versification also helped to transform the surrender itself into something much larger in its implications—an event not simply about Burgoyne, or even imperial Britain as a whole, but about human pride and the capacity for evil. This is how the story would be remembered in the poems and ballads published after the fact, as evidenced in such works as Grateful Reflections On the Divine Goodness vouchsaf’d to the American Arms in their remarkable successes in the Northern Department, after the giving up of our Fortresses at Ticonderoga. By the end of the war, Burgoyne’s name would be turned into a verb meaning “to be defeated at the moment of apparent triumph,” as in the title of a 1781 ballad on the Battle of Yorktown, “Cornwallis Burgoyned.”11

      Such narrative logic as this, in which poetry appeared not simply as a mode of commentary but as an agent in the historical process itself, would in turn account for another common motif in Revolutionary verse: namely, the tendency of poets to indulge in fantasies about the potential effects of the publication of their poems. As we shall find in Chapter 3, this will most often involve poems purporting to expose some sinister conspiracy against the public good, whether in the guise of a rebel or Tory cabal or, in the aftermath

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