Hugh Henry Brackenridge

Hugh Henry Brackenridge 1748-1816, American author and jurist, b. Scotland, grad. Princeton, 1771. He studied theology and served in the American Revolution as chaplain, but later turned to law. His early writings include two patriotic plays and some verse. In 1781 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he founded (1786) the Pittsburgh Gazette, the city's first newspaper, and helped to establish the Pittsburgh Academy (now the Univ. of Pittsburgh). A leading Pennsylvania supporter of the federal Constitution, Brackenridge later acted (1794) as a peacemaker in the Whiskey Rebellion. He was also a justice of the Pennsylvania supreme court from 1799 to his death. He is, however, best known as an author. His satirical and picaresque novel, Modern Chivalry (6 vol., 1792-1805; rev. ed., 4 vol., 1804-7), written in a vigorous style, pictures backwoods life in America. In it, the moderate democrat Brackenridge ridicules the excesses of a raw democracy. He also wrote an account of the Whiskey Rebellion and several political tracts.

Bibliography: See C. M. Newlin, Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1932, repr. 1971); biography by D. Marder (1967).

Brackenridge, Hugh Henry (1748–1816), born in Scotland, was brought to a Pennsylvania farm at the age of five, and entered Princeton in 1768, where he became intimate with Freneau and Madison, and collaborated with the former on The Rising Glory of America (1772), an ardent poetical expression of national consciousness. He studied theology, and in 1774 received his M.A., writing A Poem on Divine Revelation. During the Revolutionary War he served as a chaplain, and wrote two patriotic plays for amateur production. Both of these, The Battle of Bunkers‐Hill (1776) and The Death of General Montgomery (1777), are neoclassical dramas in rather stilted blank verse, and his more pungent contributions to the cause are included in his sermons, Six Political Discourses (1778), and in his work as editor of the patriotic United States Magazine. Repelled by strict dogma, he gave up the ministry to practice law, and in 1781 settled in the frontier village of Pittsburgh. Here he had an active political career and showed himself to be an aristocratic democrat, attempting to mediate between the federal government and the local insurrectionists during the Whiskey Rebellion, as described in his Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania (1795). His satirical contributions to the local paper mirrored his political and social ideas, which are more completely treated in his novel Modern Chivalry (1792–1815). In 1799 he was appointed justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and after his removal to Carlisle (1801) made his chief contribution to legal literature in his Law Miscellanies (1814).