Poetry Wars - Colin Wells Early American Studies

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past the outbreak of the war itself. Indeed, in the weeks immediately before the Battle of Bunker Hill, Gage gave perhaps his most momentous proclamation to date, declaring martial law in Massachusetts. Notwithstanding that his earlier proclamations had been satirized for their rhetorical extravagance, this time the governor went to the trouble of employing a ghost writer, the newly arrived Major General John Burgoyne, himself the author of numerous poems and plays, including The Maid of the Oaks, which was staged that same year at the Drury Lane Theater. As a hired stylist, Burgoyne did not disappoint, producing a proclamation twice as long as any of Gage’s earlier efforts, representing even more ostentatiously the vice-regent’s power before the people. First, the royal seal was significantly larger on this broadside than on Gage’s previous proclamations, and the obligatory list of titles more expansive: “By his Excellency, The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq.; Governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s province of Massachusetts-Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same.” Finally, the tone of the document was decidedly more pompous and indignant, as illustrated in the opening passage: “Whereas the infatuated multitudes, who have long suffered themselves to be conducted by certain well known Incendiaries and Traitors, … have at length proceeded to avowed rebellion; and the good effects which were expected to arise from the patience and lenity of the King’s government, have been often frustrated, and are now rendered hopeless, by the influence of the same evil counsels; it only remains for those who are entrusted with supreme rule … to prove they do not bear the sword in vain.”13

      Given Burgoyne’s literary pedigree, it is fitting that his first foray into the proclamation genre would draw into the versification trend two of the most famous poets of the American Revolution, Philip Freneau and John Trumbull. Scarcely twenty-three years old, Freneau was eager to lend his pen to the cause of the resistance, and his parody Thomas Gage’s Proclamation Versified, which appeared in July 1775, was the first of several anti-Gage poems he would publish that year. Trumbull, meanwhile, who had already achieved some literary renown for The Progress of Dulness (1772–1773), was petitioned by Silas Deane and other delegates to the Congress to compose a burlesque account of Gage’s military exploits. While working on that poem, which would eventually become the mock epic M’Fingal, he also quickly produced an anti-Gage versification entitled A New Proclamation! which appeared in the Connecticut Courant in August 1775 and as a separate pamphlet soon after. Following the tendency of the earlier parodies, Trumbull made much of the idea that the proclamation constituted a discursive or literary form, taking particular aim at Burgoyne’s rhetorical flourishes. Indeed, in the opening lines, he alludes to what many readers would have recognized as the definitive satire of the haughty proclamation—the one read before Gulliver on behalf of the emperor of Lilliput in the opening section of Gulliver’s Travels. Nor does this allusion merely satirize the vice-regent’s affectation, but it comments pointedly on the real limitations of Gage’s power in his army’s losses at Bunker Hill (see Figure 3):

      By THOMAS GAGE, whom British frenzy,

      Stil’d honourable and Excellency,

      O’er Massachusett’s [sic] sent to stand here

      Vice Admiral and Chief Commander;

      Whose power Gubernatorial still

      Extends as far as Bunker’s-Hill,

      Whose Admiralty reaches clever,

      Full half a mile up Mistic river,

      Let ev’ry clime and ev’ry nation

      Attend once more—

      A PROCLAMATION.

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      As in the earlier anti-Gage versifications, Trumbull highlights Gage’s self-conscious performance by emphasizing the conventions of the proclamation as a form: “WHEREAS th’infatuated creatures, / Still led by folks whom we call traitors….” The parodied Gage acknowledges this pattern of repeating “whereas” clauses through the poem, adding parenthetically near the end, “And now (for bravely we come on, / One more Whereas, and then we’ve done).” Yet ironically, here, the function of the “whereas” clause—to set up the proclamation by stating universally acknowledged facts—only reinforces the precariousness of Gage’s military authority, forcing him to admit as fact that the rebels have “proceeded to give battle, / And with deep wounds, that fate portend, / Gall’d many a Reg’lar’s latter end.”14

      Along the same lines, in a digression from the original document, the fictional Gage confesses that his entire practice of disseminating proclamations has all along been part of a wholly dishonest propaganda campaign. Elaborating on a statement from the original proclamation about how “the press, that distinguished appendage of public liberty” has been “prostituted to the most contrary purposes,” Trumbull adds fifty lines in which Gage complains that the people have refused to credit the falsehoods put out by Loyalist printers, such as James Rivington and Samuel Draper, before including Gage himself as a chief propagandist: “Did ye not,” Gage asks, “Scare ev’ry Printer bold and wise, / Who dar’d to publish Tory lies? / Nay when myself in Proclamation, / Spread wholesome falsehoods through the nation, / … / … / Did ye not all refuse to credit, / As if some common lyar had said it”?15 Beyond charging that Gage’s proclamations are inherently dishonest, this passage is significant for the way it circumscribes the entire proclamation/versification phenomenon within the context of an increasingly democratized public sphere. It is not simply that the anonymous public has taken to newspapers and broadsides to speak back to the unidirectional utterances of the king’s vice-regent, declaring him to be a liar. It is also that Gage’s proclamations have failed to embody power in language as they have purported to do: they exist rather as merely one form of discourse within a larger struggle among competing writers and printers, each contrasting their opponents’ “counterfeit” representations with their own “genuine” ones. And as long as proclamations continue to pretend to embody imperial power, Trumbull’s poem suggests, they will continue to be unmasked as mere texts.

      Insofar as this specific exchange involved the immediate question of whether or not Bostonians would turn in their weapons and submit to martial law, it served as well to symbolize a public commitment to the rebellion and incipient war. Indeed, this point is given special emphasis in Freneau’s contribution to the genre. Seizing on Gage’s promise to pardon those who lay down their arms and “return to the duties of peaceable subjects,” Freneau turns the gesture into a comically detailed catalogue of the many violent punishments that Gage promises not to employ against those who submit:

      That whosoe’er keeps gun or pistol,

      I’ll spoil the motion of his systole;

      Or, whip his breech, or cut his wesen,

      As haps the measure of his Treason:—

      But every one that will lay down

      His hanger bright, and musket brown,

      Shall not be beat, nor bruis’d, nor bang’d

      Much less for past offences, hang’d.…16

      Strictly speaking, this passage is not so much parody as literary inversion, as Freneau is less interested in mimicking Gage’s words than in laying bare the violent tendency concealed by his pretense of restraint. In the context of the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought only days before to the publication of the parody, the message was clear: there would be no turning back in this as yet unnamed war, for to submit to the demands of Gage’s proclamation would be to give up whatever advantage the insurgency had gained in exchange for a false promise of lenience.

      As war propaganda, the versifications from the summer of 1775 reinforced

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