The Hartford Wits and the Voice of Anarch

The “Poetry and the Constitution” event I described yesterday made me think there must have been poetry about the Constitution, part of the debate around that document. So I went looking.

In October 1786, some fraction of the “Hartford Wits”—David Humphreys (shown here twenty years later), Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins—published a poem in The New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine.

Those verses were represented to the public as fragments of an ancient text found in a fort somewhere off to the west, like Ohio.

Over the next several months the Wits produced more verses for the newspaper, most supposedly pieces of a mock epic called The Anarchiad. This text told the story of a war between the spirit Anarch [boo! hiss!] and Hesper, “the guardian of the clime.”

By presenting these poems as “fragments,” the authors could eschew narrative or logical coherence and present their views on current troubles, such as:

• The Articles of Confederation just weren’t working out, and Connecticut hadn’t even participated in the Annapolis Convention to fix them.
• In western Massachusetts middling farmers were resisting taxes and shutting down courts while Rhode Island was issuing lots of paper money.
• A couple of local officials were being a real bother. (The Wits were already feuding with those men in the newspapers.)
• Young people today.

Here’s a short taste from Book IV, in the voice of Anarch:

Behold the reign of anarchy, begun,
And half the business of confusion done.
From hell’s dark caverns discord sounds alarms,
Blows her loud trump, and calls my SHAYS to arms,
O’er half the land the desperate riot runs,
And maddening mobs assume their rusty guns.
From councils feeble, bolder faction grows,
The daring corsairs, and the savage foes;
O’er Western wilds, the tawny bands allied,
Insult the States of weakness and of pride;
Once friendly realms, unpaid each generous loan,
Wait to divide and share them for their own.

Now sinks the public mind; a death-like sleep
O’er all the torpid limbs begins to creep;
By dull degrees decays the vital heat,
The blood forgets to flow, the pulse to beat;
The powers of life, in mimic death withdrawn,
Closed the fixed eyes with one expiring yawn;
Exposed in state, to wait the funeral hour,
Lie the pale relics of departed power;
While conscience, harrowing up their souls, with dread,
Their ghost of empire stalks without a head.

That installment was first published on 11 Jan 1787. A couple of weeks later, Daniel Shays’s Regulator force tried to seize the federal armory in Springfield. Militia general William Shepard and his men fought them off, killing four. “Behold the reign of anarchy,” indeed.

TOMORROW: More constitutional commentary.

“Aged SAM. in dotage frail”?

Yesterday I quoted some lines from Dr. Lemuel Hopkins’s poem welcoming the year 1795 for the Connecticut Courant.

Having praised Federalist heroes from Massachusetts, Hopkins turned to attacking the state’s Jeffersonians:

But still no flowers of greatness grow,
Where thorny plagues lurk not below:
There swarms Honestus’ rabble throng,
And Lawyer Incest joins the song;
While Jarvis with his bob-tail crew,
Retreats before great AMES’s view.

“Honestus” was a pen name of Benjamin Austin, Jr. “Lawyer Incest” referred to Perez Morton, who had been caught having an affair with his wife’s sister. “Jarvis” was Dr. Charles Jarvis. They were all Jeffersonian politicians. Against them, Hopkins favored the Federalist party of Fisher Ames.

And now, O Muse! throw Candour’s veil,
O’er aged SAM. in dotage frail;
And let past services atone,
For recent deeds of folly done;
When late aboard the Gallic ship,
Well fraught with democratic flip,
He praying fell on servile knees,
That France alone might rule the seas;
While Sense and Reason took a nap,
And snor’d in Jacobinic cap.

This political attack had to start out more delicately. No one could deny Samuel Adams’s leadership during the Revolution. He was still popular enough to have just been elected governor. Finally, though Adams was senior voice for limiting federal power in Massachusetts and still saw potential in the French Revolution, he didn’t oppose all of President George Washington’s policies like some of his younger colleagues.

On the other hand, on 3 Nov 1794 Gov. Adams had issued a proclamation reminding Massachusetts officials of their obligations under Article Seventeen of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between France and the U.S. of A. That agreement required American ports not to offer refuge to British naval vessels or formerly French ships that they had captured.

In doing so, Adams cited a recent message from Edmund Randolph, Secretary of State, who was struggling to maintain President Washington’s neutrality policy. Hopkins and his fellow New England Federalists revered Washington, but they leaned heavily toward Britain and disliked any accommodation of the French.

Therefore, Hopkins attacked Samuel Adams as “in dotage frail,” “on servile knees” about a “Gallic ship.” Because that’s the true spirit of the New Year.

“Where BOSTONIA lifts her spires”

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition to share a “carrier verse” at the turn of the year. Traditionally those were poems written and printed by newspaper apprentices as a way to cadge tips from their customers.

Often those apprentices commented on political concerns, but usually in a general, patriotic way, looking ahead to a better year. They didn’t want to put anybody in an ungenerous mood, after all.

In the early republic the high Federalist “Connecticut Wits” seized on the “carrier verse” form as a vehicle for their political satire. Without the same economic pressures as the apprentices, they dug deeper into domestic public affairs, lambasted their political rivals, and went on and on. And on.

Dr. Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801, shown here as painted by John Trumbull, courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery) wrote such a poem for the Connecticut Courant’s 1 Jan 1795 issue. Here’s just a snatch of it, the part dealing with Massachusetts politics:

Yet where BOSTONIA lifts her spires.
Like Phenix from devouring fires,
See federal Virtue take her stand,
And ward Destruction from the land.
Hail Nurse of Heroes! Statesmen sage!
The guard and glory of the age!

At the end of June 1794, a fire broke out in the ropewalk district of Boston’s South End. It consumed those proto-industrial buildings and many nearby houses before people could put it out. Hopkins praised Boston for rising above such disasters through the strength of its Federalist politics.

Above the mists of mouldering time,
Thy Fame, O ADAMS! soars sublime,
Who first the British lion spurn’d,
And gave the terms when peace return’d;
Cull’d from the lapse of ages past,
And fram’d a Work with time to last;
Display’d in truth’s celestial light,
How Freedom, Law, and Power unite.

Even though President George Washington hadn’t yet announced that he would not seek reelection, New England Federalists were coalescing behind John Adams as his obvious successor. These lines laud Adams’s early support for independence and his role in negotiating the 1783 Treaty of Paris. They couldn’t praise his accomplishments as Vice President since, of course, there weren’t any.

May choicest Sowers with tears bedew’d,
O’er thy brave WARREN’s grave be strew’d;
And long heroic LINCOLN stand,
The laurel’d bulwark of the land.

Here Hopkins referred to Dr. Joseph Warren and Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. Warren was a beloved martyr who for obvious reasons left no thoughts about the politics of the 1790s and therefore could be seized on by either party.

Lincoln had led the repression of the Shays Rebellion in between serving briefly as U.S. Secretary of War under the Congress and as lieutenant governor under John Hancock. Lincoln wasn’t really involved in politics anymore by this time, but he was a Federalist.

That praise out of the way, Hopkins turned to what the Connecticut Wits did best—saying nasty things about what they disliked.

TOMORROW: New Year’s wishes for one’s enemies.

A Medical Poet and a “Cancer Quack”

Dr. Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801) was born and trained in Waterbury, Connecticut. He served briefly in the Revolutionary War, his early biographies say—without specifying how. In 1784 Hopkins moved to Hartford and became one of that town’s conservative wits, publishing essays and verse.

Hopkins’s most famous poem is a response to traveling cancer specialists like the Pope family, who advertised their cures in newspapers.

A Patient Killed by a Cancer Quack

Here lies a fool, flat on his back,
The victim of a cancer quack,
Who lost his money and his life,
By plaister, caustic and the knife.
The case was this—a pimple rose,
South-east a little of his nose;
Which daily redden’d and grew bigger,
As too much drinking gave it vigor;
A score of gossips soon ensure
Full threescore different modes of cure;
But yet the full-fed pimple still
Defied all petticoated skill;
When fortune led him to peruse
A hand-bill in the weekly news;
Sign’d by six fools of different sorts,
All cured of cancers made of warts;
Who recommend, with due submission,
This cancer-monger as magician;
Fear wing’d his flight to find the quack,
And prove his cancer-curing knack;
But on his way he found another,—
A second advertising brother:
But as much like him as an owl
Is unlike every handsome fowl;
Whose fame had raised as broad a fog,
And of the two the greater hog:
Who used a still more magic plaister,
That sweat forsooth, and cured the faster.
This doctor view’d, with moony eyes
And scowl’d-up face, the pimple’s size;
Then christen’d it in solemn answer,
And cried, “this pimple’s name is cancer.
But courage, friend, I see you’re pale,
My sweating plaisters never fail;
I’ve sweated hundreds out with ease,
With roots as long as maple trees;
And never fail’d in all my trials—
Behold these samples here in vials!
Preserved to show my wondrous merits,
Just as my liver is—in spirits.
For twenty joes the cure is done—”
The bargain struck, the plaister on,
Which gnaw’d the cancer at its leisure,
And pain’d his face above all measure.
But still the pimple spread the faster,
And swell’d, like toad that meets disaster.
Thus foil’d, the doctor gravely swore,
It was a right-rose cancer sore;
Then stuck his probe beneath the beard,
And show’d him where the leaves appear’d;
And raised the patient’s drooping spirits,
By praising up the plaister’s merits.—
Quoth he, “The roots now scarcely stick—
I’ll fetch her out like crab or tick;
And make it rendezvous, next trial,
With six more plagues, in my old vial.”
Then purged him pale with jalap drastic,
And next applied the infernal caustic.
But yet, this semblance bright of hell
Served but to make the patient yell;
And, gnawing on with fiery pace,
Devour’d one broadside of his face—
“Courage, ’tis done,” the doctor cried,
And quick the incision knife applied:
That with three cuts made such a hole,
Out flew the patient’s tortured soul!

Go, readers, gentle, eke and simple,
If you have wart, or corn, or pimple;
To quack infallible apply;
Here’s room enough for you to lie.
His skill triumphant still prevails,
For death’s a cure that never fails.

I’m not sure this poem helped anybody, but writing it probably made Dr. Hopkins feel better.