put; a black under dress, shoes and large buckles, with a large cocked hat, and a gold-headed cane.”39 Plummer hereafter named himself “Poet Laureate” to “Lord Dexter,” declaring, “I am, my Lord, in frost or summer, / Your Poet Laureat, Jon’than Plummer.”40 Despite the fact that he purveyed news and other goods, this claim to being a poet laureate in the equipage of Lord Dexter gave Plummer a much more antiquated role in the community, one that enabled a richly ironic contrast between the pseudo-aristocratic styling of his vocation and the genres of his verses.41
Figure 2. Jonathan Plummer, “The Tragedy of Louis Capet” (Newburyport, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
His addresses to Dexter, most of which were published in newspapers, accordingly called upon a pastoral register similar to that of his coterie poems and quite different from the sensationalized, reportorial language of his broadsides (although this poem, too, details the news of Dexter’s recent return to town).
Your lordship’s welcome back again—
Fair nymphs, with sighs, have mourn’d your staying
So long from them and me your swain,
And wonder’d at such long delaying:
But now you bless again our eyes;
Our melting sorrow droops and dies.42
During the period of this “laureateship,” Plummer began to have prophetic dreams in which a voice announced to him, in verse, his fortune and the fates of those around him. These dreams prompted a religious conversion, and his poems from this point forward adopted the language of providential utterance, using disasters and catastrophes—“terrible accidents, drownings, suicides, and hangings,” in the words of one contemporary—as evidence of the wondrous interventions of God into human affairs and as a pretext to exhort audiences to repent while they still had time.43 Plummer’s “Elegy on the death of His Excellency Sir TIMOTHY DEXTER” combined several of the genres in which Plummer’s broadsides circulated. The elegy begins venally enough, with Plummer lamenting Dexter’s death as a loss of patronage: “Of this kind patron, I’m bereft, / He’s all his cash, and poet left.”44 Yet rather than aligning himself with Dexter’s fame, wealth, or position or casting his elegy as the security for Dexter’s future renown, Plummer takes Dexter’s death as an occasion to call all unrepentant sinners to account:
Figure 3. Jonathan Plummer, poet laureate to Lord Dexter. Illustration from Samuel L. Knapp, Life of Lord Timothy Dexter (Newburyport: John G. Tilton, 1852).
O let us solemn warning take,
And all our sins at once forsake,
Rememb’ring that’twill soon be said,
Of all of us, that we are dead!
Rememb’ring that quite soon we must,
Be mouldering into loathsome dust!
Ah! on this earthly, weeping shore,
My patron, Dexter, lives no more!45
The poem eschews the conventional maneuvers of neoclassical elegy and instead adopts the hortatory tone of millennial religion. The “Sketch of the character of LORD DEXTER” clarifies Plummer’s position: “by the kindness of God [Dexter] was generally a very triumphant conquerer; but in regard to the main business that he was sent into the world to transact I cannot positively say how it was with my deceased friend. I must confess that though I have hopes of him through the kindness of God, I am not without fears.”46 Fealty to his Lordship was no longer enough to blind Plummer to the more pressing needs of his calling:
This I do know courteous reader, that you & I will shortly follow the generous Dexter through the dark valley of the shadow of death, and appear before the judgment seat of Christ, at the judgment day, to be judged according to the deeds done in the body, whether they have been good, or whether they have been evil…. It may therefore be proper for us, while we indulge ourselves in proper reflections concerning the departed Dexter, to be very careful to consider our own ways.47
Not surprisingly, Plummer identified himself on this sheet as “a travelling preacher, & poet lauret to his Lordship,” and itinerancy thereafter defined his stance toward the public. In later broadsides, he titled himself, among other things, “a traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader,” “an independent traveling preacher,” “a lay Bishop extraordinary; and a traveling preacher, Physician, Poet, and Trader,” and “a latter-day Prophet, Lay-Bishop, traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader.”48 Yet while Plummer’s poems trafficked in cosmic revelations and global exhortations to repent, his subjects stayed local and timely, so that these later broadsides remained generically linked to news, scandal, and rumor, even while they also adopted the styles and modes of sermons, exegesis, and disputation. For instance, “Dreadful Fire at Portsmouth!” (1814) concerned many things, including
a great, and dreadful fire at Portsmouth (N. H.) that began to consume houses on the evening of the 22d of December, 1813. About 180 buildings, it is thought were burned. On the deaths of about 200 American and British soldiers, marines and sailors, and about 535 Creek Indians, killed lately in various battles. On the deaths of Captain Manour, and another man drowned in the Merrimack, and of Capt. John Brockway of Newburyport, Capt. Lambert and one Woodbury of Salem, Peter Queening, probably of Gloucester, one Nye of Hallowel, and 11 others belonging probably to Fish-island, in New York, drowned in or near the Atlantic Ocean. On the deaths of about 20 people who have died lately of the spotted fever in Vermont, and Newhampshire: on the death of one Norris, one Ring, and a young woman named Hovey of Hallowell, who lately perished in, or near the Atlantic: and on the deaths of one Smiley, who it is said cut his throat at Newington (N. H.) and one Phippes and a woman named Nichols, who it is supposed have killed themselves at Salem.49
The broadside collated local news items (the fire at Portsmouth), more personal local tragedies (the various suicides and deaths at sea), and also international dispatches from the ongoing war with Britain, including a lurid description of the massacre at Fort Mims, Alabama, which had taken place the year before. These tragedies and disasters all revealed divine providence:
Almighty Father! Potent God!
How awful is thy chast’ning rod;
When wicked men are lifted high,
And swords are drawn, and bullets fly,
And sins provoke thy potent hand,
To put destruction in a land,
And make proud sinners hopes expire,
By shewing of thy dreadful ire!50
The sermonic aspects of the poem and the narrative worked in tandem with their sensational features—this broadside also resembles a tabloid with a banner headline—to produce the idiom of latter-day prophecy that imbues the sheet as a whole. However, it is not the case that the lurid details satisfied one set of readerly desires, while the sermon and its providential interpretations satisfied another, higher set of desires; nor did the lurid details attract readers simply so that the providential interpretation could then moralize them. Instead, the work of divination—revealing
