in newspapers and in others as broadsides or longer pamphlets. They were penned by anonymous amateur versifiers whose modest skill at composing poetic meter betrayed their inexperience and likely lack of formal education, as well as by the two best-remembered poets of the Revolution, John Trumbull and Philip Freneau. More important, the versification vogue, as it was called, extended beyond Gage’s own proclamations to those issued by other vice-regents and military commanders, from Howe to Burgoyne, and in at least a few cases, were turned back against the directives of Washington and the Continental Congress by British and Loyalist wits. As one participant observed at the time, “Of late, Versification is come in vogue, and now Proclamations, Speeches, Messages, Orations, &c. seem not to be relished in plain prose, but, to please the public Taste, they must be versified.”1
This comment notwithstanding, the vogue for versifications was never simply a matter of appealing to the public taste for verse rather than prose. The near simultaneous appearance of verse parodies of Gage’s proclamations instead reflected a deeper recognition, first, of the manner in which the proclamation as a form functioned to assert political authority and, second, of the capacity of poetry—or more precisely, verse—to neutralize that power. Let us begin with the proclamation as a form of legal text: what did it mean to issue a proclamation in colonial America prior to the Revolution? In one sense, it meant little because the form had long become ubiquitous, and its purposes—not unlike proclamations issued occasionally by modern politicians—were often innocuous. Fundamentally, proclamations communicated official information to the people, informing them about a new law, redefining colonial boundaries, or announcing occasions of public thanksgiving or celebration (to cite only a few examples of what amounted to perhaps hundreds of proclamations issued prior to 1774). In another sense, however, to issue a proclamation meant a great deal: as a formal order announced to the public by a monarch or a representative of the monarchy, the proclamation had always constituted a special kind of printed text, one that self-evidently demonstrated and enacted a legal authority to compel the king’s subjects to act or assent to its contents. Indeed, as was made most explicit by the practice of reading a proclamation in public, the proclamation declared the king’s will to his subjects, interpellating its audience as subject to the king’s coercive power as much as to the concrete directives of the proclamation itself.2
Figure 2. Thomas Gage, By His Excellency, the Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq., 1775. Gage’s proclamation of June 12, 1775, which declared martial law in Massachusetts Bay. Library of Congress.
At the same time, as even a casual acquaintance with eighteenth-century proclamations makes clear, beyond merely enacting monarchical authority, the proclamation also performed this authority by way of various rhetorical and iconographic techniques that had defined the proclamation as a genre. Most colonial proclamations, for instance, included a prominent royal seal at the head of the document, and nearly all began with an elaborate enumeration of the titles of authority claimed by the vice-regent as well as a rationale for how that authority emanated ultimately from the king: “By His Excellency The Hon. Thomas Gage, Esq; Governor, and Commander in Chief in and over his Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts-Bay, and Vice Admiral of the same” (see Figure 2). In addition, the body of the text was usually characterized by a ceremonious or legalistic tone, often following the familiar pattern of “whereas” clauses followed by a formal declaration of law, and nearly always concluded with a record of the precise time and place of its issue, thus highlighting its role as the formal agent by which a law comes into existence: “Given at Boston, the Twelfth Day of June, in the Fifteenth Year of the Reign of His Majesty GEORGE the Third, By the Grace of God, of Great-Britain, France and Ireland, KING, Defender of the Faith, &c.”3
This is the proclamation, in short, as a self-consciously performative representation of a ruler’s power “not for but ‘before’ the people,” to borrow the phrase long since used by Jürgen Habermas to describe the communication of political power before the structural transformation of the public sphere into a “sphere of public authority,” capable of compelling other forms of political authority to “legitimate” themselves “before public opinion.” Representing the king’s power before the people is certainly what General Gage appears to have had in mind when issuing his first proclamations to the people of Boston in the spring and summer of 1774. Yet the versification vogue that ensued illustrates that, regardless of the authorial intentions that were built into the proclamation as a form, the public perception of its implicit claim to authority was indeed undergoing a transformation. Gage’s proclamations and the manifold literary responses to them constitute a particularly fraught episode in the generic history of the proclamation, containing a number of implications not only for Gage’s own brief career as governor and commander in chief but also for the history of political verse as a mode of public discourse.4
By the time of Gage’s arrival in Boston, it was clear in several respects that the ideological assumptions concerning the relationship between power and printed texts were already undergoing a shift, one that did not bode well for the expectation that a proclamation would be treated implicitly as the law. For one thing, the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts protests had undermined any expectation that even a direct declaration of law would simply be assented to by a passive public. For another, colonial leaders had for some time been engaged in what William B. Warner recently described as the communications war that preceded the Revolution. Going back at least to the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768 (which had declared the Townshend Acts unconstitutional), this textual struggle began in earnest with a series of rival authoritative documents issued by the Boston Committee of Correspondence, including the public nonimportation pact known as the “Solemn League and Covenant,” which appeared a month after Gage’s arrival. Against this backdrop, Gage’s proclamations from the summer of 1774 appear as a concerted attempt to reverse this discursive trend by reasserting the vestigial authority once granted to royal proclamations. Indeed, one of Gage’s first publicly issued proclamations registered this reality immediately: in response to the Boston committee’s call for a suspension of all trade with Britain unless the Port Law be rescinded, Gage issued “A Proclamation for discouraging certain illegal Combinations,” which declared illegal not only the specific recommendations of the Committee but even its very authority to make such recommendations. His proclamation, in effect, proclaimed that no other proclamation should be obeyed.5
This was hardly an ideal situation for a royal governor to find himself in, which is why, perhaps out of frustration, Gage followed this act by issuing a very different sort of proclamation—not to give a new order or make a new rule but, as the title put it, “For the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for preventing and punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality.” Gage well knew that the problem his government faced in 1774 was neither vice nor profaneness but open resistance by a growing number of Bostonians. Why he chose to take this more indirect approach is hinted at in the first paragraph, which states his intention to begin his term of office by imitating King George’s own inaugural act when he ascended to the throne in 1760:
In humble Imitation of the laudable Example of our most gracious Sovereign GEORGE the Third, when in the first Year of his Reign was pleased to Issue his Royal Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for preventing Vice and Immorality…. I therefore, by and with the Advice of his Majesty’s Council, publish this Proclamation, exhorting all his Majesty’s Subjects to avoid all Hypocrisy, Sedition, Licentiousness, and all other Immoralities, and to have a grateful Sense of all God’s Mercies, making the divine Laws the Rule of their Conduct.
The key word here is sedition, and this theme becomes increasingly emphatic as the proclamation approaches its concrete purpose: to require justices of the peace to restore law and order and to urge the local clergy, who might have been sympathetic toward the committee and its supporters, to use their sermons to inculcate a due submission to authority. Gage thus seems to intend for his second proclamation to restore the colony
