This is the case of one poem, whose title—A New Collection of Verses Applied to the First of November, A.D. 1765, &c. Including a Prediction that the S---p A-t shall not take Place in North America—goes so far as to predict that the king will experience just such a change of heart before the act even takes effect. Indeed, over the course of several hundred lines, the poem presents this narrative in religious terms, beginning with a public fast in anticipation of the dreaded day: “November! gloomy Month! approaches fast / When Liberty was doom’d to brethe [sic] her last, / All, All her Sons agree to fast that Day, / To mourn, lament, and sigh, and hope,—and pray / That Almighty GOD of all below, / Some Pity would to suffering Mortals show.” This collective prayer is heard by an angel called “the Guardian of America,” who flies to London (not to Parliament, importantly, but to St. Paul’s Cathedral) and declares from the top of the dome that a “rape” against Liberty has been committed, and that those responsible will be rightly judged for their crimes: “—A Rape! A Rape! / In this Life, Misery shall be your Shame, / And bitter Execrations load your Name. / Impartial Pages shall report your Case, / And curse your Memories with just Disgrace.” After a lengthy speech in which the Guardian of America chastises Mother Britain for refusing to hear her children’s pleas, Britain relents, and the angel returns to announce, “The King and Parliament have heard my Voice: / … / The Stamp’s repeal’d!” And the repeal, importantly, leads not merely to a return to the status quo ante but to something more closely resembling a transformation of the social order itself, as members of all classes, races, and religions join in celebration:
The Lads commix, and Sectaries combine
In Love and Union to the Powers divine.
Old Light and New forget to disagree,
And each enjoy the Fruits of Charity.
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The Sick forget to groan, the Poor to beg;
The Cripple dances on his wooden Leg.
The Blacks rejoice, the Indians gravely smile;
The daily Labourers forget their Toil.25
Beyond depicting the rejoicing public as a decidedly humble body of poor, disabled, and racially marginalized figures, the conclusion is significant for the celebration itself, which might well cause this poem to be mistaken for one of the many verses published after the repeal of the Stamp Act. Yet this collection was published well before the news of the repeal ever reached America, which helps explain, in turn, how poets could come to see themselves as agents in the historical process. For at least a brief moment between the repeal of the Stamp Act and the imposition of the new Townshend duties, the literary fantasy that the king could be convinced of his errors seemed to be confirmed in reality. Indeed, actual celebrations of the repeal of the act in 1766, with fireworks and the tolling of bells, seemed to mimic the happy ending imagined in such poems, and carrier’s addresses published in the wake of the repeal included reminders of their successful defiance during the crisis: “When SLAV’RY to our Shore had crept, / And other TYPES in Silence slept; I, dauntless for my Country’s Good, / The ARBITRARY ACT withstood: / I brought your News, the Rest neglect you, / A certain sign, I most RESPECT you.” As the pun on “types” makes clear, this is a statement about one newspaper’s commitment to the resistance, but its point extends to anyone charged with addressing the public in a time of political crisis. For this speaker, the Stamp Act constituted a crucial test of whether one would resist the forces of “slavery” or remain silent; whether a printer or poet passed that test suggested that he could be trusted in the event of the next crisis, which would soon come.26
If the carrier’s address represented a consciously populist mode of poetic resistance, its high literary counterpart might be termed the “satire of the times.” This is a genre that also appeared spontaneously in 1765, in the form of the two lengthiest anti–Stamp Act poems, The Times. A Poem, published anonymously by Boston physician Benjamin Church, and the still-anonymous Oppression. A Poem. By an American. With Notes, by a North Briton. Besides their length, what set these works apart from other Stamp Act verses was the ideological significance communicated through their form; in contrast to the informal and occasional verse tradition to which the newsboy’s addresses belonged, these works consciously announced themselves as part of the Augustan satiric tradition that had reached its apex in 1730s and 1740s Britain in the poetry of Alexander Pope, Edward Young, and others, and which had continued into the 1760s in the works of Charles Churchill. Befitting this tradition, The Times and Oppression: A Poem responded to the Stamp Act crisis in consciously transatlantic or imperial terms, recounting the history of Britain as a narrative of ongoing political corruption and satiric response, first by Pope and Young, and then by Churchill, who also addressed Parliamentary impositions on the liberties of those Britons who represented the political opposition. Within this narrative, the Stamp Act crisis appeared as merely the most recent of such impositions, the latest in a half-century-long history of political abuse.
The extent to which Oppression: A Poem calls to mind a transatlantic literary-political opposition is evident, first and foremost, in the circumstances of its publication. Though the poem’s subtitle identifies the author as “an American,” the poem was first published in London in 1765 before being reprinted the same year in Boston and New York, thus addressing not only outraged Americans but the considerable number of Britons already inclined to sympathize with their American countrymen. A similar point is made in the reference to “Notes, by a North Briton,” which readers would immediately recognize as referring to the Opposition newspaper, the North Briton, published by John Wilkes and edited by Churchill. Throughout its publication in 1762 and 1763, the North Briton had repeatedly charged that the court and Parliament had come under the control of a corrupt cabal of Scots (or North Britons), led by John Stuart, Earl of Bute, who was accused of manipulating the king into imposing policies that opposed the people’s interests. Similarly, the author of Oppression: A Poem singles out Bute and his prime ministerial successor, George Grenville, as masterminds of a twofold assault against true English liberty—the Stamp Act on the one hand and, on the other, Wilkes’s 1763 arrest and expulsion from Parliament for seditious libel—a charge that arose specifically from his publication of the North Briton, No. 45, for which he had become an international symbol of the struggle to defend British liberty against government coercion.27
That the author of Oppression: A Poem understood his work as belonging to a decades-long tradition of satiric resistance is announced as well in the poem’s opening lines. For while the poem directs its satire most explicitly at the Stamp Act, it presents the crisis as part of a problem of government corruption that has plagued Britain since at least the 1720s, and it does so, importantly, through of a series of allusions to several well-known eighteenth-century satires:
WHEN private faith and public trusts are sold,
And traitors barter liberty for gold:
When giant-vice and irreligion rise,
On mountain’d falsehoods to invade the skies:
When fell corruption, dark and deep, like fate,
Saps the foundation of our happy state:
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When tyrants skulk behind a gracious T[hrone],
And practice what,—their courage dare not own;
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When countries groan beneath
