Freneau, Philip (Morin)

Freneau, Philip [Morin] (1752–1832), born in New York of Huguenot ancestry, was educated privately and at the College of New Jersey (Princeton). There he was a classmate of Madison and Brackenridge, and with the latter wrote the poem The Rising Glory of America, which was read at the graduation exercises (1771) and published the following year. While at college he also wrote “The Power of Fancy” and other poems. After assisting Brackenridge in teaching in Maryland (1772), at the outbreak of the Revolution he wrote eight biting satirical poems, which included General Gage's Soliloquy (1775) and General Gage's Confession (1775). He discovered poetry to be a poor profession, however, and turned to a secretaryship in the home of a prominent planter on the island of Santa Cruz in the West Indies, where he wrote “The Beauties of Santa Cruz,” “The Jamaica Funeral,” and “The House of Night,” romantic poems inspired by the lush tropical atmosphere. On his voyage home (June 1778) he was captured by the British, but was soon set free. After a short stay at home, he set out again for the West Indies (1780), only to be captured and, after a questionable trial, remanded to the British prison ship Scorpion in New York harbor. After a period of brutal treatment and starvation he was exchanged as a prisoner of war (July 1780). His experiences inspired the poem The British Prison Ship (1781). During the next three years he was employed in the Philadelphia post office, and in his leisure poured forth a steady stream of satirical poetry that confirmed his title of “the poet of the American Revolution.” In 1784 he sailed as master of a brig bound for Jamaica, and during the following six years led a life filled with dangers on the Atlantic and Caribbean. Meanwhile he wrote poems of life at sea, and published his first collection, Poems (1786), as well as a volume of Miscellaneous Works (1788). After his marriage in 1790 he abandoned the sea to become editor of the New York Daily Advertiser, and later, after an appointment by Jefferson as translating clerk of the State Department, on October 31, 1791, began the publication of his National Gazette, a sparkling Jeffersonian paper that particularly attacked Hamilton. During the two years of his editorship and his government appointment, Freneau was accused by Hamilton of being Jefferson's anti‐Federalist mouthpiece, and even Washington called him “that rascal Freneau.” He published Poems Written Between the Years 1768 and 1794 (1795), and after a brief editorship of the Jersey Chronicle edited the New York Time‐Piece (1797–99). On retiring to his plantation at Mount Pleasant, he issued a series of essays entitled Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects (1799). His last years were spent in New Jersey, although from 1803 to 1807 he was driven by poverty to serve again as a master of coastline freighters. In 1809, he published a two‐volume edition of his collected poems, and in a final edition of 1815 included the patriotic and satirical poems prompted by the War of 1812. A scholarly edition of his poems was edited by F.L. Pattee (3 vols., 1902–7), and a selection of his prose, edited by H.H. Clark as The Philosopher of the Forest, appeared in 1939. Last Poems (1946) contains 50 poems, mainly on topics of the day, originally published in periodicals between 1815 and 1832. Among his best‐known short poems of freedom are Libera Nos, Domine, the ode God Save the Rights of Man, “To the Memory of the Brave Americans, On the Memorable Victory of John Paul Jones, and To My Book, while among his noteworthy poems of romantic fancy are “The Indian Burying Ground,” “The Wild Honey Suckle,” “The Indian Student,” On a Honey Bee, On Retirement, To a Catydid, and Advice to a Raven in Russia.