Part 7

_Samuel Adams._--Samuel Adams was a man of letters, but he was so only because he was above all things a man of affairs. Of literary art, in certain forms, he was no mean master; of literary art for art’s sake, he was entirely regardless. He was perhaps the most voluminous political writer of his time in America, and the most influential political writer of his time in New England; but everything that he wrote was meant for a definite practical purpose, and nothing that he wrote seemed to have had any interest for him aside from that purpose. Deep as is the obscurity which has fallen upon his literary services in the cause of the Revolution, the fame of those services was, at the time of them, almost unrivalled by that of any other writer, at least in the colonies east of the Hudson River. Born in Boston in 1722, graduated at Harvard in 1740, he early showed an invincible passion and aptitude for politics. One principal instrument by means of which Samuel Adams so greatly moulded public opinion, and shaped political and even military procedure, was the pen. Of modern politicians, he was among the first to recognise the power of public opinion in directing public events, and likewise the power of the newspaper in directing public opinion. It was, therefore, an essential part of his method as a politician to acquire and to exercise the art of literary statement in a form suited to that particular end. He had the instinct of a great journalist, and of a great journalist willing to screen his individuality behind his journal. In this service, it was not Samuel Adams that Samuel Adams cared to put and to keep before the public,--it was the ideas of Samuel Adams. Accordingly, of all American writers for the newspapers between the years 1754 and 1776, he was perhaps the most vigilant, the most industrious, the most effective, and also the least identified. Ever ready to efface himself in what he did, he realised that the innumerable productions of his pen would make their way to a far wider range of readers, and would be all the more influential, if they seemed to be the work, not of one writer, but of many. Therefore, he almost never published anything under his own name; but, under a multitude of titular disguises which no man has yet been able to number, this sleepless, crafty, protean politician, for nearly a third of a century, kept flooding the community with his ideas, chiefly in the form of essays in the newspapers,--thereby constantly baffling the enemies of the Revolutionary movement, and conducting his followers victoriously through those battles of argument which preceded and then for a time accompanied the battles of arms. In the long line of his state papers--the official utterances of the several public bodies with which he was connected and which so long trusted him as their most deft and unerring penman--one may now trace, almost without a break, the development of the ideas and the measures which formed the Revolution. If we take into account the strain of thought and of emotional energy involved in all these years of fierce political controversy and of most perilous political leadership, we shall hardly fear to overestimate the resources of Samuel Adams in his true career of agitator and iconoclast;--especially the elasticity, the toughness, the persistence of a nature which could, in addition to all this, undertake and carry through, during the same long period, all the work he did in literary polemics,--work which alone might seem enough to employ and tire the strength even of a strong man who had nothing else to do.

The traits of Samuel Adams the writer are easily defined--for they are likewise the traits of Samuel Adams the politician, and of Samuel Adams the man. His fundamental rule for literary warfare was this--“Keep your enemy in the wrong.” His style, then, was the expression of his intellectual wariness,--a wariness like that of the scout or the bushwhacker, who knows that behind any tree may lurk his deadly foe, that a false step may be his ruin, that a badly-aimed shot may make it impossible for him ever to shoot again. Whether in oral or in written speech his characteristics were the same,--simplicity, acuteness, logical power, and strict adaptation of means to the practical end in view. Nothing was for effect--everything was for effectiveness. He wrote pure English, and in a style severe, felicitous, pointed, epigrammatic. Careful as to facts, disdainful of rhetorical excesses, especially conscious of the strategic folly involved in mere overstatement, an adept at implication and at the insinuating light stroke, he had never anything to take back or to apologise for. In the wearisome fondness of his country for Greek and Roman analogies, he shared to the full; and, in a less degree, in its passion for the tags and gewgaws of classical quotation. Of course, his style bears the noble impress of his ceaseless and reverent reading of the English Bible. To a mere poet, he seldom alludes. Among secular writers of modern times, his days and nights were given, as occasion served, to Hooker, Coke, Grotius, Locke, Sidney, Vattel, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Hume.

_John Witherspoon._--Although John Witherspoon did not come to America until the year 1768,--after he had himself passed the middle line of human life,--yet so quickly did he then enter into the spirit of American society, so perfectly did he identify himself with its nobler moods of discontent and aspiration, so powerfully did he contribute by speech and act to the right development of this new nation out of the old cluster of dispersed and dependent communities, that it would be altogether futile to attempt to frame a just account of the great intellectual movements of our Revolution without some note of the part played in it by this eloquent, wise, and efficient Scotsman--at once teacher, preacher, politician, law-maker, and philosopher, upon the whole not undeserving of the praise which has been bestowed upon him as “one of the great men of the age and of the world.” Born in 1722, at the age of forty-six he accepted an invitation to the presidency of the College of New Jersey. At the time of his removal to America, he had achieved distinction as a preacher and an ecclesiastical leader. Even as an author, also, he had become well known. His advent to the college over which he was to preside was like that of a prince coming to his throne. The powerful influence which, through his published writings, Witherspoon exerted upon the course of Revolutionary thought, may be traced in the very few sermons of his which touch upon the political problems of that time, in various Congressional papers, and especially in the numerous essays, long or short, serious or mirthful, which he gave to the press between the years 1775 and 1783, and commonly without his name. As a writer of political and miscellaneous essays, it is probable that Witherspoon’s activity was far greater than can now be ascertained; but his hand can be traced with certainty in a large group of keen and sprightly productions of that sort. Of all these writings, the chief note is that of a virile mind, well-balanced, well-trained, and holding itself steadily to its own independent conclusions,--in short, of enlightened and imperturbable common sense, speaking out in a form always temperate and lucid, often terse and epigrammatic.

_John Woolman._--It is no slight distinction attaching to American literature for the period of the Revolution, that in a time so often characterised as barren of important literary achievement, were produced two of the most perfect examples of autobiography to be met with in any literature. One of these, of course, is Franklin’s _Autobiography_, the first, the largest, and the best part of which was written in 1771,--a work that has long since taken its place among the most celebrated and most widely read of modern books. Almost at the very time at which that fascinating story was begun, the other great example of autobiography in our Revolutionary literature was finished--_The Journal of John Woolman_, a book which William Ellery Channing long afterward described as “beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography in the language.” It is a notable fact, however, that while these two masterpieces in the same form of literature are products of the same period, they are, in respect of personal quality, very nearly antipodal to each other; for, as Franklin’s account of himself delineates a career of shrewd and somewhat selfish geniality, of unperturbed carnal content, of kindly systematic and most successful worldliness, so the autobiography of Woolman sets forth a career which turns out to be one of utter unworldliness, of entire self-effacement, all in obedience to an Unseen Leadership, and in meek and most tender devotion to the happiness of others--especially slaves, poor toiling white people, and speechless creatures unable to defend themselves against the inhumanity of man.

John Woolman, who was of a spirit so unpresuming that he would have wondered and have been troubled to be told that any writing of his was ever to be dealt with as literature, was born in 1720 in Northampton, New Jersey, his father being a farmer, and of the Society of Friends. Until his twenty-first year, he lived at home with his parents, and, as he expressed it, “wrought on the plantation.” Having reached his majority, he took employment in the neighbouring village of Mount Holly, in a shop for general merchandise. In this occupation he passed several years; after which he began to give himself almost wholly to the true work of his life--that of an apostle, with a need to go from land to land in fulfilment of his apostleship, and able, like one of the greatest of all apostles, to minister to his own necessities by the labours of a lowly trade. For, long before he set out upon these travels, even from his early childhood, he had entered, as he thought, into the possession of certain treasures of the spirit which he could not hoard up for himself alone,--which, if he could but share them with others, would make others rich and happy beyond desire or even imagination.

The autobiography of John Woolman was the gradual and secret growth of many years, beginning when he was of the age of thirty-six, and added to from time to time until, at the age of fifty-two, being in the city of York, in England, about the business of his Master, he was stricken down of the smallpox, whereof he died. Besides this story of his life, he left several ethical and religious essays. All these writings are, as Whittier has said, in the style “of a man unlettered, but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart enters into his language.” “The secret of Woolman’s purity of style,” said Channing, “is that his eye was single, and that conscience dictated the words.” There is about John Woolman’s writings that unconventionality of thought, that charity without pretence, that saintliness without sanctimony or sourness, that delicacy, that untaught beauty of phrase, by which we are helped to understand the ardour of Charles Lamb’s love for him, as uttered in his impulsive exhortation to the readers of the _Essays of Elia_: “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart.” “A perfect gem!” wrote Henry Crabb Robinson, in 1824, of Woolman’s _Journal_, which Lamb had shortly before made known to him. “His is a ‘schöne Seele.’ An illiterate tailor, he writes in a style of the most exquisite purity and grace. His moral qualities are transferred to his writings.” Perhaps, after all, the aroma that lingers about Woolman’s words is best described by Woolman’s true spiritual successor in American literature--Whittier--in the saying, that he who reads these writings becomes sensible “of a sweetness as of violets.”

_Benjamin Franklin._--For the period of the Revolution the writings of Franklin fall naturally into two principal divisions--first, those connected with the Revolutionary controversy, and, secondly, those almost entirely apart from it. Among the latter, of course, are to be reckoned his numerous papers on scientific discoveries and mechanical inventions; a considerable number of his personal letters--these being, perhaps, the wisest and wittiest of all his writings; many short sketches, usually playful in tone, often in the form of apologues or parables; finally, the first, and the best, part of his _Autobiography_, which, during the hundred years succeeding its first publication in 1791, has probably been the most widely read book of its class in any language. Here, then, as a product of Franklin’s general literary activity during the Revolutionary period, is a considerable body of literature not concerned in the strifes of that bitter time, almost faultless in form, and so pervaded by sense, gaiety, and kindness, as to be among the most precious and most delightful of the intellectual treasures of mankind.

In Franklin’s literary contributions to the Revolutionary controversy between 1763 and 1783, we find that his relation to that controversy had two strongly contrasted phases: first, his sincere and most strenuous desire that the dispute should not pass from the stage of words to that of blows, and thence to a struggle for American secession from the empire; and, secondly, after the stage of blows had been reached, his championship of American secession through war as the only safe or honourable course then left to his countrymen. The line of division between these two phases of opinion and action falls across the spring and early summer of 1775. Prior to that time, all his writings, serious or jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose of convincing the English people that the American policy of their government was an injustice and a blunder, and of convincing the American people that their demand for political rights would certainly be satisfied, if persisted in steadily and without fear, but also without disloyalty and without unseemly violence. Subsequent to that time, having accepted with real sorrow the alternative of war and of war for American secession, all his writings, serious and jocose, are pervaded by the one purpose of making that war a successful one,--a result to which, as a writer, he could best contribute by such appeals to public opinion in America as should nourish and quicken American confidence in their own cause, and by such appeals to public opinion in Europe as should win for that cause its moral and even its physical support. For reasons that must be obvious, his general literary activity was far greater during the first phase of this controversy than during the second.

Probably no writer ever understood better than he how to make dull subjects lively, and how, by consequence, to attract readers to the consideration of matters in themselves unattractive. As he well knew, the European public, whether upon the Continent or in Great Britain, were not likely to give their days and nights to the perusal of long and solemn dissertations on the rights and wrongs of his countrymen in the other hemisphere. Accordingly, such dissertations he never gave them, but, upon occasion, brief and pithy and apparently casual statements of the American case; exposing, also, the weak points of the case against his own, by means of anecdotes, epigrams, _jeux-d’esprit_; especially contriving to throw the whole argument into some sort of dramatic form.

Franklin’s favourite weapon in political controversy--a weapon which, perhaps, no other writer in English since Dean Swift has handled with so much cleverness and effect--was that of satire in the form of ludicrous analogue, thereby burlesquing the acts and pretensions of his adversary, and simply overwhelming him with ridicule. Moreover, with Franklin, as had been the case with Dean Swift before him, this species of satire took a form at once so realistic and so comically apt, as to result in several examples of brilliant literary hoaxing--a result which, in the controversy then going on, was likely to be beneficial to the solemn and self-satisfied British Philistine of the period, since it compelled him for once to do a little thinking, and also to stand off and view his own portrait as it then appeared to other people, and even in spite of himself to laugh at his own portentous and costly stupidity in the management of an empire that seemed already grown too big for him to take proper care of. As Franklin was by far the greatest man of letters on the American side of the Revolutionary controversy, so a most luminous and delightful history of the development of thought and emotion during the Revolution might be composed, by merely bringing together detached sayings of Franklin, humorous and serious, just as these fell from his tongue or pen in the successive stages of that long conflict: it would be a trail of light across a sea of storm and gloom. Nevertheless, not by illustrative fragments of what he wrote or said, any more than by modern descriptions, however vivid, can an adequate idea be conveyed of the mass, the force, the variety, the ease, the charm, of his total work as a writer during those twenty tremendous years. Undoubtedly, his vast experience in affairs and the sobriety produced by mere official responsibility had the effect of clarifying and solidifying his thought, and of giving to the lightest products of his genius a sanity and a sureness of movement which, had he been a man of letters only, they could hardly have had in so high a degree. It is only by a continuous reading of the entire body of Franklin’s Revolutionary writings, from grave to gay, from lively to severe, that any one can know how brilliant was his wisdom, or how wise was his brilliancy, or how humane and gentle and helpful were both. No one who, by such a reading, procures for himself such a pleasure and such a benefit, will be likely to miss the point of Sydney Smith’s playful menace to his daughter,--“I will disinherit you, if you do not admire everything written by Franklin.”

_Thomas Hutchinson._--Within the two decades of the American Revolution are to be found two distinct expressions of the historic spirit among this people. In the first place, from a consciousness of the meaning and worth of the unique social experiments then already made by each of the thirteen little republics, came the impulse which led to the writing of their local history. Afterward, from a similar consciousness of the meaning and worth of the immense events which began to unfold themselves in the collective political and military experience of these thirteen little republics, then rapidly melting together into a larger national life under the fires of a common danger, came the impulse which led to the writing of their general history.

Reaching the line which divides colonial themes from those of the Revolution, we confront a writer who, in his capacity as historian, not only towers above all his contemporaries, but deals with themes which are both colonial and Revolutionary. This writer is the man so famous and so hated in his day as a Loyalist statesman and magistrate, Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian who served as governor of Massachusetts under appointment by the king. That he deserves to be ranked as, upon the whole, the ablest historical writer produced in America prior to the nineteenth century, there is now substantial agreement among scholars. In writing the early history of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson was in effect writing the history of his own ancestors, some of whom had been eminent, some of whom had been notorious, in the colony almost from the year of its foundation. He was born in Boston in 1711. From the age of twenty-six when he was elected to his first office, until the age of sixty-three when he resigned his last one, he was kept constantly and conspicuously in the public service. Before the outbreak of the great controversy between the colonies and the British government, no other man in America had, to so high a degree as Hutchinson, the confidence both of the British government on the one hand, and of his own countrymen on the other. Had his advice been taken in that controversy by either of the two parties who had so greatly confided in him, the war of the Revolution would have been averted. While the writing of history was for Hutchinson but the recreation and by-play of a life immersed in outward business, the study of history seems to have been a passion with him almost from his childhood. It should be added that Hutchinson had the scientific idea of the importance of primary documents. Through his great eminence in the community, and through his ceaseless zeal in the collection of such documents, he was enabled in the course of many years to bring together a multitude of manuscript materials of priceless value touching the history of New England. With such materials at his command, and using with diligence those fragments of time which his unflagging energy enabled him to pluck from business and from sleep, he was ready, in July, 1764, amid the first mutterings of that political storm which was to play havoc with these peaceful studies and to shatter the hopes of his lifetime, to send to the printer, in Boston, the first volume of _The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay_. He published his second volume in the early summer of the year 1767,--not far from the very day on which Parliament, by the passage of the Townshend Act, perpetrated the ineffable folly of plunging the empire into such tumults as led to its disruption. Notwithstanding the lurid and bitter incidents amid which it was written, the second volume of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts, like the first one, has the tone of moderation and of equanimity suggestive of a philosopher abstracted from outward cares, and devoted to the disinterested discovery and exposition of the truth.

From the time of the publication of the second instalment of his work, sixty-one years were to elapse before the public should receive ocular evidence that the author had had the fortitude, amid the calamities which overwhelmed his later years, to go on with his historical labours, and to complete a third and final volume, telling the story of Massachusetts from the year 1750 until the year 1774--the year in which he laid down his office as governor and departed for England. Borne down with sorrow, amazed and horror-stricken at the fury of the storm that was overturning his most prudent calculations, and was sweeping him and his party from all their moorings out into an unknown sea, he found some solace in resuming in England the historical task which he had left unfinished. In his diary for October 22, 1778, its completion is recorded in this modest note: “I finished the revisal of my History, to the end of my Administration, and laid it by.” Laid by certainly it was, and not until the year 1828 was it permitted to come forth to the light of day, and then, largely, through the magnanimous intervention of a group of noble-minded American scholars in the very city which, in his later lifetime, would not have permitted his return to it.