SATIRE

Satire, the art of ridiculing human vice and folly, was arguably the most popular and politically important literary form during the Revolutionary and early republican periods. In fiction, drama, and particularly poetry, satire emerged during this time as a crucial means for shaping American social and political discourse, intervening in virtually every major controversy from the Stamp Act crisis to the War of 1812.

Befitting the political turbulence and fervor that characterized the era, early American satirists envisioned their works as weapons in a literary and ideological war to decide the future of the new Republic. During the Revolution, anti-British satires appeared regularly in newspapers or as broadsides, responding to specific events and depicting King George III and his supporters as villains or buffoons. The most prominent satirical writers of the Revolution included John Trumbull, author of M'Fingal (1776), a burlesque of a typical Tory magistrate, and Philip Freneau, who published dozens of burlesque portraits of the king and various colonial governors and generals. Satirists on the Loyalist side, meanwhile, employed comparable tactics against the Patriots, as in Jonathan Odell's The American Times (1780), a vitriolic assault against George Washington, John Hancock, and other Revolutionary leaders.

As with much eighteenth-century American poetry, verse satire from the Revolutionary and early republican periods was highly allusive, even consciously imitative, of English Augustan masterpieces by Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and others. Still, the Revolutionary period introduced a number of uniquely American characteristics and themes. American satirists were especially drawn, for instance, to writing verse parodies of other printed texts such as newspaper articles or official government documents. During the war, broadsides proclaiming martial law or demanding the arrest of rebels were frequently answered by anonymous verse parodies, such as William Livingston's "Burgoyne's Proclamation" (1777), ridiculing not only the colonial official who issued the proclamation but the language of political authority itself. This capacity of satire to alter or subvert the meaning of other printed texts would, in turn, make possible the principal literary dynamic of the early national period: poets representing one political perspective would engage in satiric exchanges with poets from the opposing side.

After the Revolution, satirists weighed in on the numerous social and economic challenges facing the new United States, and soon individual authors were identifying themselves with specific policies and parties. During the debate over the Constitution, a group of poets later known as the Connecticut Wits (Trumbull, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, and Lemuel Hopkins) collaborated on "The Anarchiad" (1786–1787), which ridiculed the the Articles of Confederation and its defenders as unable or unwilling to resolve the social and economic crises that arose. After the federal government was formed, writers suspicious of Washington's administration, including Freneau and St. George Tucker, commenced a satiric counterattack in the pages of Freneau's National Gazette. At the same time, a new assemblage of Connecticut Wits (Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight) collaborated on a series of satires directed against the emerging Jeffersonian party, particularly for their sympathy toward the French Revolution (see, for instance, "The Echo" [1791–1798] and "The Political Greenhouse for 1798"). The 1790s thus constituted the high point of verse satire in the early national period, with writers engaged in often bitter personal attacks over issues ranging from the Jay Treaty (1795) to the election of 1800.

Not all satire from this period was political; nor was it limited to poetry. John Trumbull's first important work, "The Progress of Dulness" (1772–1773), took aim at Yale College and New Haven society, while his friend Timothy Dwight ridiculed the theological doctrines of Deists and Universalists in The Triumph of Infidelity (1788). In drama, Royall Tyler's The Contrast (1787) portrayed various American stock figures in a lightly satirical, though affectionate, light, while in fiction, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's early novel Modern Chivalry (1792–1797) responded with more caustic irony to the social implications of increasing democratization.

After the election of Jefferson, some Federalists, such as Thomas Green Fessenden in Democracy Unveiled (1805), continued the earlier strategy of unmasking Jeffersonian Democracy as a false ideology that primarily benefited demagogues and Southern slave owners. More generally, however, writers after 1800 turned away from the satiric ideal of literature as a means of political intervention and toward a contrasting notion of literature as refuge from the ruthless world of politics. Thus, although satire would live on in the 1810s and 1820s, it would appear chiefly in the guise of works written to entertain rather than to spur political action, as in the essays and stories of Washington Irving.

See alsoFiction; Humor; Newspapers; Poetry .

bibliography

Dowling, William C. Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801–1812. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

Granger, Bruce. Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763–1783. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960.

Wells, Colin. The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Colin Wells