The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

THE CONNECTICUT WITS

IN the days when Connecticut counted in the national councils; when it had men in the patriot armies, in Washington’s Cabinet, in the Senate of the United States – men like Israel Putnam, Roger Sherman, Oliver Wolcott, Oliver Ellsworth, – in those same days there was a premature but interesting literary movement in our little commonwealth. A band of young graduates of Yale, some of them tutors in the college, or in residence for their Master’s degree, formed themselves into a school for the cultivation of letters. I speak advisedly in calling them a school: they were a group of personal friends, united in sympathy by similar tastes and principles; and they had in common certain definite, coherent, and conscious aims. These were, first, to liberalize and modernize the rigidly scholastic curriculum of the college by the introduction of more elegant studies: the belles lettres, the literae humaniores. Such was the plea of John Trumbull in his Master’s oration, “An Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts,” delivered at Commencement, 1770; and in his satire, “The Progress of Dulness,” he had his hit at the dry and dead routine of college learning. Secondly, these young men resolved to supply the new republic with a body of poetry on a scale commensurate with the bigness of American scenery and the vast destinies of the nation: epics resonant as Niagara, and Pindaric odes lofty as our native mountains. And finally, when, at the close of the Revolutionary War, the members of the group found themselves reunited for a few years at Hartford, they set themselves to combat, with the weapon of satire, the influences towards lawlessness and separatism which were delaying the adoption of the Constitution.

My earliest knowledge of this literary coterie was derived from an article in The Atlantic Monthly for February, 1865, “The Pleiades of Connecticut.” The “Pleiades,” to wit, were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight. The tone of the article was ironic. “Connecticut is pleasant,” it said, “with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, peddlers, and single women, – but there are no poets known to exist there.. the brisk little democratic state has turned its brains upon its machinery.. the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a profit can be made – except poetry.”

Massachusetts has always been somewhat condescending towards Connecticut’s literary pretensions. Yet all through that very volume of the Atlantic, from which I quote, run Mrs. Stowe’s “Chimney Corner” papers and Donald Mitchell’s novel, “Doctor Johns”; with here and there a story by Rose Terry and a poem by Henry Brownell. Nay, in an article entitled “Our Battle Laureate,” in the May number of the magazine, the “Autocrat” himself, who would always have his fling at Connecticut theology and Connecticut spelling and pronunciation (“Webster’s provincials,” forsooth! though pater ipse, the Rev. Abiel, had been a Connecticut orthodox parson, a Yale graduate, and a son-in-law of President Stiles), – the “Autocrat,” I say, takes off his hat to my old East Hartford neighbor, Henry Howard Brownell.

He begins by citing the paper which I have been citing: “How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut?.. But the seed of the Muses has run out. No more Pleiades in Hartford.”; and answers that, if the author of the article asks Nathanael’s question, putting Hartford for Nazareth, he can refer him to Brownell’s “Lyrics of a Day.” “If Drayton had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with the six hundred at Balaclava, each of these poets might possibly have pictured what he said as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has painted the sea fights in which he took part as a combatant.”

Many years later, when preparing a chapter on the literature of the county for the “Memorial History of Hartford,” I came to close quarters with the sweet influence of the Pleiades. I am one of the few men – perhaps I am the only man – now living who have read the whole of Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad.” “Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?” asks Hawthorne’s crazy correspondent. “Unconscionable man!.. And does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas, with machinery contrived on the principle of the steam engine?” I also “perused” (good old verb – the right word for the deed!) Dwight’s “Greenfield Hill” – a meritorious action, – but I cannot pretend to have read his “Conquest of Canaän” (the diaeresis is his, not mine), an epic in eleven books and in heroic couplets. I dipped into it only far enough to note that the poet had contrived to introduce a history of our Revolutionary War, by way of episode, among the wars of Israel.

It must be acknowledged that this patriotic enterprise of creating a national literature by tour de force, was undertaken when Minerva was unwilling. These were able and eminent men: scholars, diplomatists, legislators. Among their number were a judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court, a college president, foreign ministers and ambassadors, a distinguished physician, an officer of the Revolutionary army, intimate friends of Washington and Jefferson. But, as poetry, a few little pieces of the New Jersey poet, Philip Freneau, – “The Indian Student,” “The Indian Burying Ground,” “To a Honey Bee,” “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and “The Battle of Eutaw Springs,” – are worth all the epic and Pindaric strains of the Connecticut bards. Yet “still the shore a brave attempt resounds.” For they had few misgivings and a truly missionary zeal. They formed the first Mutual Admiration Society in our literary annals.

This was while Colonel Humphreys was in the army – one of Washington’s aides. But when he resigned his commission, – hark! ’tis Barlow sings: —

Humphreys, in turn, in his poem “On the Future Glory of the United States of America,” calls upon his learned friends to string their lyres and rouse their countrymen against the Barbary corsairs who were holding American seamen in captivity: —

Yes, to be sure, where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame? He came from Watertown (now a seat of learning), a cousin of Governor Trumbull – “Brother Jonathan” – and a second cousin of Colonel John Trumbull, the historical painter, whose battle pieces repose in the Yale Art Gallery. Cleverness runs in the Trumbull blood. There was, for example, J. Hammond Trumbull (abbreviated by lisping infancy to “J. Hambull”) in the last generation, a great sagamore – O a very big Indian, – reputed the only man in the country who could read Eliot’s Algonquin Bible. I make no mention of later Trumbulls known in letters and art. But as for our worthy, John Trumbull, the poet, it is well known and has been often told how he passed the college entrance examination at the age of seven, but forebore to matriculate till a more reasonable season, graduating in 1767 and serving two years as a tutor along with his friend Dwight; afterwards studying law at Boston in the office of John Adams, practising at New Haven and Hartford, filling legislative and judicial positions, and dying at Detroit in 1831.

Trumbull was the satirist of the group. As a young man at Yale, he amused his leisure by contributing to the newspapers essays in the manner of “The Spectator” (“The Meddler,” “The Correspondent,” and the like); and verse satires after the fashion of Prior and Pope. There is nothing very new about the Jack Dapperwits, Dick Hairbrains, Tom Brainlesses, Miss Harriet Simpers, and Isabella Sprightlys of these compositions. The very names will recall to the experienced reader the stock figures of the countless Addisonian imitations which sicklied o’er the minor literature of the eighteenth century. But Trumbull’s masterpiece was “M’Fingal,” a Hudibrastic satire on the Tories, printed in part at Philadelphia in 1776, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782, “by Hudson and Goodwin near the Great Bridge.” “M’Fingal” was the most popular poem of the Revolution. It went through more than thirty editions in America and England. In 1864 it was edited with elaborate historical notes by Benson J. Lossing, author of “Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution.” A reprint is mentioned as late as 1881. An edition, in two volumes, of Trumbull’s poetical works was issued in 1820.

Timothy Dwight pronounced “M’Fingal” superior to “Hudibras.” The Marquis de Chastellux, who had fought with Lafayette for the independence of the colonies; who had been amused when at Windham, says my authority, by Governor Jonathan Trumbull’s “pompous manner in transacting the most trifling public business”; and who translated into French Colonel Humphreys’s poetical “Address to the Armies of the United States of America,” – Chastellux wrote to Trumbull à propos of his burlesque: “I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer… I prefer it to every work of the kind, – even ‘Hudibras.’ ” And Moses Coit Tyler, whose four large volumes on our colonial and revolutionary literature are, for the most part, a much ado about nothing, waxes dithyrambic on this theme. He speaks, for example, of “the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American people.” But surely all this is very uncritical. All that is really alive of “M’Fingal” are a few smart couplets usually attributed to “Hudibras,” such as —

“M’Fingal” is one of the most successful of the innumerable imitations of “Hudibras”; still it is an imitation, and, as such, inferior to its original. But apart from that, Trumbull was far from having Butler’s astonishing resources of wit and learning, tedious as they often are from their mere excess. Nor is the Yankee sharpness of “M’Fingal” so potent a spirit as the harsh, bitter contempt of Butler, almost as inventive of insult as the saeva indignatio of Swift. Yet “M’Fingal” still keeps a measure of historical importance, reflecting, in its cracked and distorted mirror of caricature, the features of a stormy time: the turbulent town meetings, the liberty poles and bonfires of the patriots; with the tar-and-feathering of Tories, and their stolen gatherings in cellars or other holes and corners.

After peace was declared, a number of these young writers came together again in Hartford, where they formed a sort of literary club with weekly meetings – “The Hartford Wits,” who for a few years made the little provincial capital the intellectual metropolis of the country. Trumbull had settled at Hartford in the practice of the law in 1781. Joel Barlow, who had hastily qualified for a chaplaincy in a Massachusetts brigade by a six weeks’ course of theology, and had served more or less sporadically through the war, came to Hartford in the year following and started a newspaper. David Humphreys, Yale 1771, illustrious founder of the Brothers in Unity Society, and importer of merino sheep, had enlisted in 1776 in a Connecticut militia regiment then on duty in New York. He had been on the staff of General Putnam, whose life he afterwards wrote; had been Washington’s aide and a frequent inmate at Mount Vernon from 1780 to 1783; then abroad (1784–1786), as secretary to the commission for making commercial treaties with the nations of Europe. (The commissioners were Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson.) On returning to his native Derby in 1786, he had been sent to the legislature at Hartford, and now found himself associated with Trumbull, who had entered upon his Yale tutorship in 1771, the year of Humphreys’s graduation; and with Barlow, who had taken his B.A. degree in 1778. These three Pleiades drew to themselves other stars of lesser magnitude, the most remarkable of whom was Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a native of Waterbury, but since 1784 a practising physician at Hartford and one of the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. Hopkins was an eccentric humorist, and is oddly described by Samuel Goodrich – “Peter Parley” – as “long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling legs.” “His nose was long, lean, and flexible,” adds Goodrich, – a description which suggests rather the proboscis of the elephant, or at least of the tapir, than a feature of the human countenance.

Other lights in this constellation were Richard Alsop, from Middletown, who was now keeping a bookstore at Hartford, and Theodore Dwight, brother to Timothy and brother-in-law to Alsop, and later the secretary and historian of the famous Hartford Convention of 1814, which came near to carrying New England into secession. We might reckon as an eighth Pleiad, Dr. Elihu H. Smith, then residing at Wethersfield, who published in 1793 our first poetic miscellany, printed – of all places in the world – at Litchfield, “mine own romantic town”: seat of the earliest American law school, and emitter of this earliest American anthology. If you should happen to find in your garret a dusty copy of this collection, “American Poems, Original and Selected,” by Elihu H. Smith, hold on to it. It is worth money, and will be worth more.

The Hartford Wits contributed to local papers, such as the New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Courant, a series of political lampoons: “The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” and “The Political Greenhouse,” a sort of Yankee “Dunciad,” “Rolliad,” and “Anti-Jacobin.” They were staunch Federalists, friends of a close union and a strong central government; and used their pens in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and to ridicule Jefferson and the Democrats. It was a time of great confusion and unrest: of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, and the irredeemable paper currency in Rhode Island. In Connecticut, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five years’ pay to the officers of the disbanded army. “The Echo” and “The Political Greenhouse” were published in book form in 1807; “The Anarchiad” not till 1861, by Thomas H. Pease, New Haven, with notes and introduction by Luther G. Riggs. I am not going to quote these satires. They amused their own generation and doubtless did good. “The Echo” had the honor of being quoted in Congress by an angry Virginian, to prove that Connecticut was trying to draw the country into a war with France. It caught up cleverly the humors of the day, now travestying a speech of Jefferson, now turning into burlesque a Boston town meeting. A local flavor is given by allusions to Connecticut traditions: Captain Kidd, the Blue Laws, the Windham Frogs, the Hebron pump, the Wethersfield onion gardens. But the sparkle has gone out of it. There is a perishable element in political satire. I find it difficult to interest young people nowadays even in the “Biglow Papers,” which are so much superior, in every way, to “M’Fingal” or “The Anarchiad.”

Timothy Dwight would probably have rested his title to literary fame on his five volumes of theology and the eleven books of his “Conquest of Canaän.” But the epic is unread and unreadable, while theological systems need constant restatement in an age of changing beliefs. There is one excellent hymn by Dwight in the collections, – “I love thy kingdom, Lord.” His war song, “Columbia, Columbia, in glory arise,” was once admired, but has faded. I have found it possible to take a mild interest in the long poem, “Greenfield Hill,” a partly idyllic and partly moral didactic piece, emanating from the country parish, three miles from the Sound, in the town of Fairfield, where Dwight was pastor from 1783 to 1795. The poem has one peculiar feature: each of its seven parts was to have imitated the manner of some one British poet. Part One is in the blank verse and the style of Thomson’s “Seasons”; Part Two in the heroic couplets and the diction of Goldsmith’s “Traveller” and “Deserted Village.” For lack of time this design was not systematically carried out, but the reader is reminded now of Prior, then of Cowper, and again of Crabbe. The nature descriptions and the pictures of rural life are not untruthful, though somewhat tame and conventional. The praise of modest competence is sung, and the wholesome simplicity of American life, under the equal distribution of wealth, as contrasted with the luxury and corruption of European cities. Social questions are discussed, such as, “The state of negro slavery in Connecticut”; and “What is not, and what is, a social female visit.” Narrative episodes give variety to the descriptive and reflective portions: the burning of Fairfield in 1779 by the British under Governor Tryon; the destruction of the remnants of the Pequod Indians in a swamp three miles west of the town. It is distressing to have the Yankee farmer called “the swain,” and his wife and daughter “the fair,” in regular eighteenth century style; and Long Island, which is always in sight and frequently apostrophized, personified as “Longa.”

The poet celebrates Connecticut artists and inventors: —

David Bushnell of Saybrook had invented a submarine torpedo boat, nicknamed “the American Turtle,” with which he undertook to blow up Lord Admiral Howe’s gunship in New York harbor. Humphreys gives an account of the failure of this enterprise in his “Life of Putnam.” It was some of Bushnell’s machines, set afloat on the Delaware, among the British shipping, that occasioned the panic celebrated in Hopkinson’s satirical ballad, “The Battle of the Kegs,” which we used to declaim at school. “See,” exclaims Dwight, —

Dr. Holmes, who knew more about Yale poets than they know about each other, has rescued one line from “Greenfield Hill.” “The last we see of snow,” he writes, in his paper on “The Seasons,” “is, in the language of a native poet,

This is from a bard more celebrated once than now, Timothy Dwight, the same from whom we borrowed the piece we used to speak, beginning (as we said it),

The line with the drift in it has stuck in my memory like a feather in an old nest, and is all that remains to me of his ‘Greenfield Hill.’ ”

As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, Dr. Dwight, by his sermons, addresses, and miscellaneous writings, his personal influence with young men, and his public spirit, was a great force in the community. I have an idea that his “Travels in New England and New York,” posthumously published in 1821–1822, in four volumes, will survive all his other writings. I can recommend Dwight’s “Travels” as a really entertaining book, and full of solid observation.

Of all the wooden poetry of these Connecticut bards, David Humphreys’s seems to me the woodenest, – big patriotic verse essays on the model of the “Essay on Man”; “Address to the Armies of the United States”; “On the Happiness of America”; “On the Future Glory of the United States”; “On the Love of Country”; “On the Death of George Washington,” etc. Yet Humphreys was a most important figure. He was plenipotentiary to Portugal and Spain, and a trusted friend of Washington, from whom, perhaps, he caught that stately deportment which is said to have characterized him. He imported a hundred merino sheep from Spain, landing them from shipboard at his native Derby, then a port of entry on the lordly Housatonic. He wrote a dissertation on merino sheep, and also celebrated the exploit in song. The Massachusetts Agricultural Society gave him a gold medal for his services in improving the native breed. But if these sheep are even remotely responsible for Schedule K, it might be wished that they had remained in Spain, or had been as the flocks of Bo-Peep. Colonel Humphreys died at New Haven in 1818. The college owns his portrait by Stuart, and his monument in Grove Street cemetery is dignified by a Latin inscription reciting his titles and achievements, and telling how, like a second Jason, he brought the auream vellerem from Europe to Connecticut. Colonel Humphreys’s works were handsomely published at New York in 1804, with a list of subscribers headed by their Catholic Majesties, the King and Queen of Spain, and followed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and numerous dukes and chevaliers. Among the humbler subscribers I am gratified to observe the names of Nathan Beers, merchant, New Haven; and Isaac Beers & Co., booksellers, New Haven (six copies), – no ancestors but conjecturally remote collateral relatives of the undersigned.

I cannot undertake to quote from Humphreys’s poems. The patriotic feeling that prompted them was genuine; the descriptions of campaigns in which he himself had borne a part have a certain value; but the poetry as such, though by no means contemptible, is quite uninspired. Homer’s catalogue of ships is a hackneyed example of the way in which a great poet can make bare names poetical. Humphreys had a harder job, and passages of his battle pieces read like pages from a city directory.

Does the modern reader recognize a forefather among these heroic patronymics? Just as good men as fought at Marathon or Agincourt. Nor can it be said of any one of them quia caret vate sacro.

But the loudest blast upon the trump of fame was blown by Joel Barlow. It was agreed that in him America had produced a supreme poet. Born at Redding, – where Mark Twain died the other day, – the son of a farmer, Barlow was graduated at Yale in 1778 – just a hundred years before President Taft. He married the daughter of a Guilford blacksmith, who had moved to New Haven to educate his sons; one of whom, Abraham Baldwin, afterwards went to Georgia, grew up with the country, and became United States Senator.

After the failure of his Hartford journal, Barlow went to France, in 1788, as agent of the Scioto Land Company, which turned out to be a swindling concern. He now “embraced French principles,” that is, became a Jacobin and freethinker, to the scandal of his old Federalist friends. He wrote a song to the guillotine and sang it at festal gatherings in London. He issued other revolutionary literature, in particular an “Advice to the Privileged Orders,” suppressed by the British government; whereupon Barlow, threatened with arrest, went back to France. The Convention made him a French citizen; he speculated luckily in the securities of the republic, which rose rapidly with the victories of its armies. He lived in much splendor in Paris, where Robert Fulton, inventor of steamboats, made his home with him for seven years. In 1795, he was appointed United States consul to Algiers, resided there two years, and succeeded in negotiating the release of the American captives who had been seized by Algerine pirates. After seventeen years’ absence, he returned to America, and built a handsome country house on Rock Creek, Washington, which he named characteristically “Kalorama.” He had become estranged from orthodox New England, and lived on intimate terms with Jefferson and the Democratic leaders, French sympathizers, and philosophical deists.