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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2002
FROM the time of Philip Freneau and Francis Hopkinson in the late
eighteenth century, New Jersey has often shared in the leadership of
American letters. In much the same manner that these Revolutionary poets
led the way to the great poetic flowering of New England, Stephen Crane
a century later influenced the modern American novel. More recently, the
Humanism of Paul Elmer More at Princeton inspired the growth of a definite and influential school of American criticism. Between these peaks in
New Jersey literature lies a chain of plateaus which represents a consistently solid contribution to American literature.
Those who, in the pre-Revolutionary era, looked to the printed word
for inspiration and enlightenment were fed, for the most part, upon a
native diet of theological dissertations, moral tracts, and political polemics.
Against this dreary mass of what Charles Lamb termed biblia-a-biblia, or
books that are not books, only the writings of the gentle Quaker preacher,
John Woolman (1720-72), shine out conspicuously with the glow of
creative literature.
Woolman, born at Ancocas (later Rancocas) in the province of West
Jersey, served as a tailor's apprentice in his youth and then for a time had
his own shop in Mount Holly. At the age of twenty-three he joined the
Quaker ministry, spending the rest of his life as an itinerant crusader
against the social evils of his time -- chiefly the evil of slavery. His Journal
embodies a remarkable picture of Colonial society. "Get the writings of
John Woolman by heart" was Lamb's counsel, and Ellery Channing spoke
of the Journal as "the sweetest and purest autobiography in the language."
The Revolutionary War produced Jonathan Odell (1737-1818), a native of Newark, whose rampant Toryism caused him to be driven from
Burlington to New York in 1776. There he wrote three verse satires in
which he characterized the Revolution as "a hideous hell-broth made up of
lies and hallucinations." Prime objects of Odell's vicious attacks were two
able patriot pamphleteers: William Livingston (1723-90), a vigorous
Elizabethtown Whig and the State's first Governor, and John Witherspoon (1723-94), president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton),
and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Witherspoon also wrote
widely on religious topics.
Although Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was a master of vitriolic political
writing and a notable influence in shaping the course of post-Revolutionary
democracy, it is as the first significant American poet that his fame endures. A few years after his birth in New York City, his family purchased
a summer residence known as "Mount Pleasant," near Middletown Point,
New Jersey. This became the poet's permanent home in later life, and
near it he perished in a blizzard. Notable among his poems, in addition to
some excellent patriotic verse and songs of the sea, are
The Wild Honeysuckle, which has been termed "the first stammer of nature poetry in
America," and The Indian Burying Ground, the earliest treatment of an
Indian theme by an American poet.
A contemporary pamphleteering rival of the man whom George Washington is said to have characterized as "that rascal Freneau," and also a
musician and poet of more than ordinary talent for his time, was Francis
Hopkinson (1737-91), who married a daughter of Colonel Joseph Borden of Bordentown and after about 1773 made his home in that city.
Hopkinson's satiric masterpiece was the ballad, The Battle of the Kegs,
which described the launching of an early ancestor of the torpedo against
British ships during the Revolutionary War.
In Washington's army during its retreat across New Jersey after the disaster at Fort Lee in 1776 was the Englishman who has been called. "the
pen of the American Revolution"; and at Newark this man began to
write the first of his Crisis pamphlets, with its famous opening sentence,
"These are the times that try men's souls." In this and a dozen or more
later issues of The Crisis, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) did a splendid
service in revivifying the flagging spirit of the Revolution. When he lived
in Bordentown, from 1781 to 1787, he was chiefly occupied with writing
on finance and economics. Paine returned there for a brief period in 1802,
momentarily forgotten in the political quarrels of a Nation which he had
helped to found.
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