of the sheet just as much as did the shocking details and gruesome descriptions. As Plummer explains,
Being sent, courteous reader, through the surprizing grace of the loveliest of the lovely to preach and write concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation, I have found a great plenty of business, and although I have yet preached but little, I have found many of my works in print, very saleable indeed, insomuch that there seems to be much room to hope that my fickle efforts in that way have served by the blessing of king Jesus, to edify, comfort, and instruct many of the sons of men, and the daughters of women.51
The outlandish ambition of this self-description only partially overshadows the interesting theory of the market that it lays out: when Plummer states, “I have found a great plenty of business,” he implies both that he has preached and written often “concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation” and also that he has discovered numerous occasions for preaching and writing (i.e., many scandals, atrocities, and tragedies to print for a desiring public). The work of sermonizing, in other words, becomes the basis for collating various items about drownings, hangings, and the like. Tragedies and atrocities are not only instances of divine providence; rather, providential interpretation is also the pretext for spreading news about death, disease, and disorder. Thus, the genres of sermon and scandal work together to create Plummer’s “business” in the broadsides that he hawks and preaches.
With vagrancy its modus operandi, such poems dwelt beneath the domain of legitimate literature, and therefore, like slander or gossip, they could propagate themselves far beyond the control of truth, authority, or legitimate culture. It is worth remembering that itinerancy was one of the most controversial aspects of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakening, and in many eighteenth-century polemics on religion, itinerant preachers were often scathingly contrasted with the settled pastorate. Adopting a title like “an independent traveling preacher” therefore carried distinct implications for contemporary norms of public order. Similarly, the vagrancy of the peddler’s work, I think, accounts for the ambivalence and hostility directed against it, which surfaces most pointedly in the frequent references made about his “ballads.” Such references are surprising, since he never wrote any. All the descriptions that exist of Plummer speak of him as though he wrote, sang, and sold ballads, even though he never titled any of his texts as a “ballad” (so far as I have discovered), and though none of his poems resemble ballads in any formal sense. Samuel L. Knapp, a writer and lawyer in Newburyport in the first half of the nineteenth century, concluded that Plummer “grew up among fishermen, clam diggers, and lobster catchers, yet his works were read by thousands…. The ballad maker and death’s head vender grew rich on the sale of his trash.”52 The ballad here marks a social class rather than a genre or form: designating Plummer a “ballad maker” signaled his ability to reach thousands of readers, made a normative distinction about the worthlessness of his poems and those who read them, and tied him and his work to a form of production only indirectly under the control of legitimating forces. Worthier writers, Knapp suggests, went ignored, while ballad makers grew rich selling their trash to the unwashed. Another memorial to Plummer, written by Redford Webster (brother of the novelist Hannah Foster), made a similar case:
Now there was a man named Plummer, and he was numbered among the bards of Essex…. And he traveled from place to place, holding converse with the wayfaring man and stranger, gathering accounts of strange accidents that befell them by flood and fire; likewise of all great or singular men and women…. And, like the minstrels of old, he sat in the chimney corner and recited to an admiring audience the adventures he had heard or witnessed; and he wove them into ballads that circulated with great rapidity. And when he walked forth, the farmers rested upon their hoe-handles to listen to his marvelous tales, or to his astonishing fluency of song; and when he ended, loaded his bags and pockets with the ripe product of their fields; as Homer of old was rewarded by the Cossite dames, after singing his Iliad to their listening children, with a trencher of figs and a cup of mulled wine.53
This memorial placed Plummer even more firmly in an archaic register, as one “numbered among the bards,” “like the minstrels of old,” or “as Homer of old,” despite the fact that Plummer “visited the University … frequented the markets and fairs, attended camp-meetings and commencements, and had sojourned in every place of public resort.”54 As a figure of antiquity, moving among the spaces of contemporary life in America, Plummer seemed, for this author, to endanger national culture. The vagrant represented not only the irruption of the antique into the modern; his itinerancy also threatened to inculcate popular disregard for legitimate public culture. Because “the song and the ballad will be remembered while there are natural feelings, and a sensibility to simplicity of expression,” this memorial concluded, “Let us not therefore any longer leave the composition of songs and ballads, to the journeymen of the Pedlar. For lo! he no longer keepeth in a corner, but under the eye, and even under the license of the police; he spreadeth out his verses, and his tales, full of superstition, of horror, of immorality; thus corrupting the innocent youth, and confirming the abandoned.”55
The passage, with all its pointed irony, betrays significant worry about the prospect of an unrestrained, popular culture of “songs and ballads” that fails to remain “in a corner” but instead brings its tales “full of superstition, of horror, of immorality” out into the open. Like a slanderous broadside—the chief virtue of which, according to W. C. Ford, was its “quiet circulation, difficult to counter or trace to its source”—the kind of poetry Plummer embodied appeared to propagate itself easily and endlessly (he wove “ballads that circulated with great rapidity”), thereby imperiling social decorum and good taste (in a historical irony, Webster’s son John would later be the defendant in one of the most infamous and sensational murder trials of the nineteenth century, a crime straight out of a Plummer broadside).56 In the face of the local, decentralized, ephemeral, and vagrant features of this poetics, a more elite stance toward culture projected the language and emblems of an imagined antiquity onto writers like Plummer. This move defined local poetry as a residual formation, one that did not merit inclusion in any narrative of American literature. By placing such poetry, and the system of relations it engendered, under the domain of “the ballad,” interpreters arrogated to themselves the power to arbitrate literary history, because to locate such work under the name of “the ballad” was to define retroactively the values and meanings of the culture in which that poetry had mattered. The hybridity of ballads—always already antique, printed, and yet oral objects of elite interest yet folk forms as well, and, most important, ubiquitous yet fated imminently to disappear—ably represents the fictions of a conflicted literary history, because the figure of “the ballad” could incorporate the material that the literary defined as other than itself.57 The unlicensed circulation of poems under the sign of “the ballad” thus gives rise, at the turn of the century, to a more restrictive sense of the poet’s relation to public order, and the balladmonger helps to make manifest an incipient sense of literariness, as a second instance illustrates.
The Down-East Homer
Thomas Shaw is sometimes called (usually with tongue in cheek) Maine’s first poet.58 Shaw was born in 1753, near Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. When he was about ten years old, his family moved to the Maine territory (then part of the Massachusetts colony), where they helped establish a settlement project (Pearsontown, later renamed Standish) on the Saco River northwest of Portland. His father Ebenezer ran the settlement’s sawmill, and he built the second frame house in the area, where Thomas would live the rest of his life. Thomas served in the Revolutionary War, fighting in the siege of Boston, and sometime during his military service he began writing poems. He returned to Maine in the late 1770s, carried on the family’s farm and mill, held a number of minor offices in Standish, and died there in 1838. During his life, Shaw published around ten poems (that I have found), which were printed as broadsides, except for one published as an eight-page pamphlet. These poems focus on local tragedies (shipwrecks, executions, and accidental deaths) and national events (the Peace of Ghent; Lafayette’s visit in 1825), and they circulated widely, with at least one reprinted in New York City. Shaw’s print bibliography is, however, only a
