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 the belief that a full-scale military uprising was not only necessary, but could succeed, precisely because Gage’s power, as measured by the success of his directives, was rapidly dwindling. In his subsequent proclamations, in fact, Gage acknowledged these limitations. One week after the martial law proclamation of June 12, Gage was forced to issue another, this one complaining that his previous order, demanding that the rebels surrender their weapons, had not been followed. Further demands would also be ignored, so that Gage’s final proclamations as governor read like self-parodies of official power—as, for instance, a proclamation in which Gage offers a reward for the names of those who have stolen the Public Seal of the Province from the Council Chamber. The sense in which this collective satiric resistance contributed to the weakening of British imperial power ensured that the fashion for penning versifications would continue even after Gage’s recall. In fact, when his replacement as commander in chief, General William Howe, issued his inaugural proclamation after arriving in Boston, he too was promptly parodied in verse, setting forth a pattern throughout the siege of Boston in which military resistance against Howe’s forces was accompanied by a steady flow of satiric verse.17
Versifications like these would continue to appear for much the Revolutionary War, again, in response to decrees issued by British military officers—the most famous being William Livingston’s brilliant versification of a proclamation to the people of New York by General John Burgoyne in the months preceding the Battle of Saratoga. The lasting relevance of the versification would arise, first and foremost, from what I have called the linguistic or textual aspect of the Revolution—the struggle waged by rival documents laying claim to political authority. Amid a conflict that hinged, at least in part, on the question of which proclamations, declarations, or directives the public would follow, a poetry geared toward undermining attempts to embody power in language would prove a powerful weapon in its own right. Embedded as it was in this specific context, the versification’s moment of cultural ascendancy would last only as long as the conditions of the war required that commandments issued by pro-British governors and generals be publicly flouted. Yet I begin with the proliferation of the versification because its significance to the dynamics of discursive and literary warfare will prove surprisingly far-reaching—in particular because the form has been largely ignored by literary scholars. Yet, as we shall see, the defining assumption that gave rise to the versification vogue—that poetry or verse constitutes a unique weapon of political struggle because it keeps always in view its linguistic element—would remain relevant long after the Revolutionary War would give way to the party wars that would follow the establishment of the new federal government. This is the context in which poetry will be produced for the express purpose of exposing the contradictions, absurdities, and hidden motives underlying the various discourses invoked by political leaders and political poets alike.
Literary Resistance and the Stamp Act Crisis
If the anti-Gage versifications of 1774 and 1775 represented in one sense a collective, spontaneous response to one royal governor’s directives, in another sense they were the product of several distinct literary developments that had arisen at least from the time of the Stamp Act, and in some cases earlier. As noted above, versifications of official discourse had appeared in America as early as the 1740s; the act of posting a satiric poem in a public place for the purpose of competing for the public’s loyalty, moreover, had spawned a subgenre in its own right, the “pump verse,” or pasquinade, which had appeared in manuscript form amid earlier, local political controversies.18 The anti-Gage versification campaign, to be sure, differed from these precursor episodes in several respects: the number of poets involved, the cross-colonial dissemination of the parodies, and, perhaps most important, the intensity of the political and ideological atmosphere in which they appeared (which culminated, of course, in the outbreak of armed conflict). At the same time, this tension itself grew out of the struggle over coercion and resistance that had begun a decade earlier with the passage of the Stamp Act. This is a process by which the perception that the act amounted to an imperial assault on colonial liberty—an assault in particular on print culture as the protector of liberty—unleashed a series of public protests, which took numerous forms, including that of poetry.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of how the Stamp Act crisis transformed American verse—another episode, significantly, that has gone largely unnoticed by scholars of the period—is the sudden politicization of colonial newsboys. By this I mean not the actual boys who, among their other duties as printer’s assistants, delivered newspapers in and around North American cities, but their literary counterparts, the fictional newsboys who addressed their customers in verse each New Year, either in the pages of the newspaper itself or in special broadsheets produced for the holiday. Reaching back at least to Aquila Rose’s New Year’s poems from the 1720s, newsboys’ verses—or carrier’s addresses, as they were also called—had by midcentury become an established genre of occasional verse, their popularity owed in large part to the two complementary functions they served. In practical terms, carrier’s addresses provided actual newsboys with the opportunity to wish their customers a happy holiday and to solicit a gratuity for their faithful service; but they also served a crucial ideological purpose, of promoting the benefits of print culture in general, usually by reminding readers of the events the newspaper
