USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 42
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XXXV. The Regicides in Connecticut, by L. A. WELLES. 32 pp. .
XXXVI. Connecticut Newspapers in the Eighteenth Century, by J. M. MORSE. 32 pp.
XXXVII. Slavery in Connecticut, by R. F. WELD. 32 pp. .
· XXXVIII. Farmington, One of the Mother Towns of Connecticut, by QUINCY BLAKELY. 32 pp. Illustrated. · · XXXIX. Yale Law School: The Founders and the Founders' Collection, by F. C. HICKS. 48 pp. Illustrated. . ·
XL. Agricultural Economy and the Population in Eighteenth-Century Con- necticut, by A. L. OLSON. 32 pp.
XLI. The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut, by A. F. MUNICH. 32 pp.
XLII. A History of Banking in Connecticut, by FRANCIS PARSONS. 32 pp. . XLIII. The History of Insurance in Connecticut, by A. A. WELCH. 36 pp. . 25c.
. 25℃. 25c.
XLIV. The Rise of Manufacturing in Connecticut, by CLIVE DAY. 32 pp.
25c.
XLV. The First Twenty Years of Railroads in Connecticut, by SIDNEY WITH- INGTON. 36 pp. Illustrated.
XLVIII. The Rise and Fall of the New Haven Colony, by C. M. ANDREWS. 56 pp. XLIX. The Development of the Brass Industry in Connecticut, by W. G. LATHROP. 32 pp.
25c. XLVI. Forty Years of Highway Development in Connecticut, 1895-1935, by the STAFF OF THE STATE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT. 20 pp. Map. 25 c . XLVII. A Lawyer of Kent: Barzillai Slosson and His Account Books, 1794-1812, by MABEL SEYMOUR. 36 pp. . 25c. 50 ℃ . 25 c . L. The Colonial Trade of Connecticut, by R. M. HOOKER. 44 pp. . LI. The Literature of Connecticut, by S. T. WILLIAMS. 24 pp. 5ºc. 25c. LII. The History of Tobacco Production in Connecticut, by A. F. McDONALD. LIII. Connecticut's Contribution to the Development of the Steamboat, by P. R. HOOPES. 32 pp. 32 pp. · 25℃. LIV. Migrations from Connecticut After 1800, by L. K. M. ROSENBERRY. 32 pp. 25c. LV. Educational Problems at Yale College in the Eighteenth Century, by ALEXANDER COWIE. 32 pp. . 25c. 25c. LVI. The Clergy of Connecticut in Revolutionary Days, by A. M. BALDWIN. LVII. Charities and Corrections in Connecticut, by W. W. T. SQUIRE. 32 pp. 32 pp. 25c. 25c.
LVIII. Connecticut Influences in Western Massachusetts and Vermont, by R. L. MORROW. 24 pp. 25c.
LIX. The Hartford Wits, by A. R. MARBLE. 32 pp. 25c.
LX. The Achievement of Religious Liberty in Connecticut, by P. W. COONS. 32 pp· 25c. .
Published and for sale for the Commission by
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
25c. 25c. 25℃. 50c. 25c.
XXX. The Beginnings of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, by O. S. SEY- MOUR. 32 pp. . 25c. 25c. 75c. 25c. 5ºc. 25c.
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
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SUSTINET
TRANSTULIT
COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
LIX The Hartford Wits ANNIE RUSSELL MARBLE
PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1936
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
LIX The Hartford Wits ANNIE RUSSELL MARBLE
I H ARTFORD on the Connecticut," as the old records often located the place, has received merited honor for its contributions to state- craft and literature during the three hun- dred years of its history. From the days of the pioneer religious leader, Thomas Hooker, with strong, persuasive words in speech and written sermon, to the nineteenth- century group of noted writers who lived as neighbors- Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe Hartford has wielded a world-wide literary in- fluence.
It was during the decade after the American Revolu- tion, called by John Fiske the critical period of American history, that Hartford became famous for its group of pungent satirists, who were ardent Federalists, and who have been recalled in literary histories as the Hartford Wits.I The lines of their aggressive poem, The Anarchiad or American antiquities, and the lighter mock-heroics of
I Some account of the Hartford Wits also appears in S. T. Williams, Litera- ture of Connecticut (no. LI in this series).
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The echo, may seem heavy and strained to readers of today, but they were models of political influence and literary form in their generation. They have a distinctive place in every retrospect of American history and letters.
None of the men who formed this group were natives of Hartford; they foregathered there, for diverse reasons, during the years of the Revolutionary War and its after- math. They had received their education, in large part, and their incentive to writing, from tutors and associates at Yale College. They represented different professions and crafts: John Trumbull was a lawyer and writer of burlesques; Colonel David Humphreys had been an aide of General Washington and a diplomat; Lemuel Hopkins was one of the most skilful, progressive physicians of his time. Richard Alsop, whose home was in Middletown, was interested in a bookstore in Hartford and spent much time there with his friends. Joel Barlow, who had been a chaplain in the war, had studied law and written poems; he was editing the American Mercury and was sharing partnership with Elisha Babcock in a printing-house and bookstore in Hartford, during a part of the time when these satires were appearing in newspapers.
Why did they choose satire to express their ardent political views and to attack their opponents and rebuke the Anti-Federalists? Because this form was then-and has been ever since-one of the most effective weapons in literature. It was much in favor, in the later eighteenth century, in England and in France. Writers in the Ameri- can colonies who had defied English misrule and urged revolt had often used irony, burlesque, lampoons, satire in many varieties, for their verses, broadsides, and plays. Philip Freneau, Francis Hopkinson, John Dickinson, Mercy Warren, John Trumbull had won readers and made political converts by the witty lines and fantastic
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situations in which they satirized King George III, Lord North, and General Gage. While they defied English rulers they imitated English writers, and their satires were closely modeled after Pope and Churchill.
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WITH whom, among these friends in Hartford, did the idea originate of writing their political satire as The Anarchiad? This is a question that has never been an- swered with definite authority. The conception has been credited to Colonel David Humphreys, to Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, to Richard Alsop, and to John Trumbull, by different surmisers. The chances favor the first sugges- tion. The form of the poem is similar to that of The Rolliad, an English satire which was one of the much- discussed publications of the months from December, 1785 to February, 1786, when David Humphreys was in England on a diplomatic mission.
The American satire was published in the New Haven gazette and the Connecticut magazine from October 26, 1786 to September 13, 1787. Its title was The Anarchiad or American antiquities: a poem on the restoration of chaos and substantial night. A prose introduction gave an ex- planation of the discovery, by an archeologist, of a ruined fortification and within "a number of utensils more curious and elegant than those of Palmyra and Hercu- laneum." In addition there was found "a folio manuscript which appeared to contain an epic poem, complete"- namely, this Anarchiad in twenty-four books. Through- out the country, from New England to Pennsylvania and Virginia, extracts from this satire were copied in news- papers and quoted on many occasions. In spite of such current interest the first edition of the collected numbers of the Anarchiad did not appear until 1861, when it was
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edited by Luther G. Riggs, with notes, and published in New Haven.
A side light upon the great demand for the original newspaper issues and a definite mention of the collabo- rators are found in a letter from Colonel David Hum- phreys to General Washington in which he recorded his desire to send several of the late papers "which contained performances written by Mr. Trumbull, Mr. Barlow, & myself, in a style & manner, I believe somewhat superior to common newspaper publications: but the demand has been so uncommonly great for those papers that there is not a single one to be obtained." He added: "It was pleasant enough to observe how some leading Men, of erroneous politics, were stung to the soul by shafts of satire."
This political satire mingled intense patriotism with imitations of Milton and Pope (for Anarch and his prose- lyte, Wronghead, were Miltonic, while certain lines were modeled after the Dunciad). Fears that the disor- ganized American states might be disrupted by such enemies as those who fostered Shays's Rebellion, by paper money, greed, and monarchical ideas, offered them specific themes for their mock-heroics. In the eighth number was a bit of persiflage possibly written by John Trumbull-at the expense of William Williams, a fine scholar and patriot, who had been one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and who was at the moment a candidate for election to the upper house of the state assembly as a Democrat. The ode, "Genius of America," in the fifth series, was written by Humphreys and included in his later collected poems. It was popular as a broadside and a song, to the tune of "The watery god, great Neptune, lay." A part of the "Speech of Hesper to the sages and counsellors at Philadelphia" has
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been ascribed to Dr. Lemuel Hopkins because it has detailed accounts of the sufferings and scars of the war veterans. The conclusion is an appeal for a centralized government and for recognition of "one potent head":
Ere death invades, and night's deep curtain falls, Through ruined realms the voice of UNION calls;
On you she calls! attend the warning cry: YE LIVE UNITED, OR DIVIDED DIE!
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THE Anarchiad was the expression of the serious political viewpoint of this small group of Hartford friends. They had a jovial side to their natures and, with the passing of years, probably increased the membership of those who gathered in offices, or around some fireside, to discuss affairs of state and educational progress. Nearly a decade passed after the first satire had been published in the New Haven gazette before a second series in lighter moods began to appear in the American Mercury, later to be collected as The echo in 1807. This weekly newspaper was established in Hartford, in 1784, by Joel Barlow and Elisha Babcock. When the Echo series began to attract attention in this journal, in August, 1791, two of the earlier group of Hartford Wits, Barlow and Humphreys, were in Europe. Besides Hopkins, Theodore Dwight, and Alsop, who wrote some of the satiric and fantastic lines, other contributors were Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith and Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell. Possibly Uriah Tracy of Litchfield, Judge Tapping Reeve, and Judge Zephaniah Swift contributed occasionally, in written lines or by oral suggestions.
The Preface to the collected series, published in 1807 in New York as The echo, with other poems, printed at the
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Porcupine Press by Pasquin Petronius, assigned these papers to "a moment of literary sportiveness, at a time when pedantry, affectation and bombast, pervaded most of the pieces published in the gazettes." "Willing to lend their aid to check the progress of false taste in American literature, the authors conceived that ridicule would prove a powerful corrective, and that the mode employed in THE ECHO, was the best suited to this purpose." The droll pseudonym for the publisher-editor, Pasquin Petronius, concealed the real name of Isaac Riley, Esq., the brother-in-law of Richard Alsop and of Theodore Dwight.
The first number of the Echo series was a parody in rhyme upon a bombastic account, printed in a Boston newspaper, in which a thunderstorm was described in such terms as "uncorked bottles of heaven," "livid fl." "," and "disploding thunders." The Hartford Wits tte, parodied the imagery:
λος
And to people to reflection given,
„al "The sons of Boston, the elect of heaven."
Presented Mercy's Angel smiling fair,
Pir Irradiate splendors frizzled in his hair,
Uncorking demi-johns, and pouring down
Heaven's liquid blessings on the gaping town.
Political as well as journalistic extravaganzas were treated with scornful irony. Ornate words by Hugh Henry Brackenridge and demagogues of the Jacobin type were burlesqued. One of the most widely read and quoted numbers was the eighteenth, New Year's verses by Hopkins which was issued in 1795 as a pamphlet entitled The democratiad; a poem in retaliation, for the Philadelphia Jockey Club, by a Gentleman of Connecticut.
The next year Hopkins, for New Year's, wrote another lampoon, The guillotina; or a democratic dirge, which was
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printed in the Connecticut courant for January 1, 1796, and reprinted as a broadside. The ire which Hopkins felt towards the Anti-Federalists was expressed with ironic humor in this stanza:
Come sing again ! since Ninety-Five, Has left some Antis still alive; Some Jacobins as pert as ever, Tho' much was hop'd from Yellow-fever.
There were other references to yellow fever and sym- pathy for its victims in The political greenhouse for the year 1798. In the copy of the Echo, once owned by John Trumbull and now in the Connecticut Historical Society, a note says that this contribution was written by Hop- kins, Alsop, and Dwight. Among the victims of this scourge of yellow fever in New York was Dr. Elihu Smith, one of the Hartford Wits. At his summer home in Litchfield, in 1793, Dr. Smith had made the first en- sive anthology of American poems. According to? thn- bull's note, Smith was the author of one of the odbo series, Extracts from democracy, an epic poem, by Aqu. he? Nimblechops. An opera, assigned to this same wr is entitled Edwin and Angelina, or the banditti, was "id formed and praised." ct
The thirteenth number of the Echo was a parody of - Democratic attack on Federal printers in the Easter states, in a Philadelphia journal of 1793. This virulen . attack, signed "Mirabeau," was echoed: .
Hartford! curst corner of the spacious earth! Where each dire mischief ripens into birth, Whence dark cabals against our statesmen rise And spread a black'ning cloud o'er eastern skies: Whose impious sons, by decency unsway'd, Nor check'd by prudence, nor by fear dismay'd,
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----
Hartford detested more by faction's race
Than harden'd sinner hates the call of grace.
Other issues of the Echo contained travesties of speeches by Thomas Jefferson and John Hancock. In January, 1799, a passage from the Echo was quoted in Congress by John Nicholas of Virginia, who affirmed that it showed Connecticut wanted war with France. There was an answer in a later Echo with a "Complimentary address to the Hon. John Nicholas."
IV
IN the group of scholars and writers who gave literary supremacy to Hartford during these years of political crisis, John Trumbull2 was one of the older and most honored by his contemporaries. Even in those days of many prodigies this minister's son from Westbury, Con- necticut, had a remarkable record. According to family tradition, he was able to read and "compose rhymes" at the age of three. At seven, he passed examinations for Yale College but his entrance "was delayed on account of his youth." During the period of waiting he "mastered" books on mathematics and English literature.
The subject of his Commencement address for the master's degree on September 12, 1770, was "An essay on the use and advantages of the fine arts"; from his undergraduate days, and through his teaching as tutor at Yale, he urged more attention to literature and less to "scholastic theology." He wrote essays in the manner of Addison and verses imitative of Pope. His burlesque, The progress of dulness (second edition, New Haven, 1773) contained a couplet that is recalled:
2 See A. Cowie, Educational problems at Yale College in the eighteenth cen- tury (no. LV in this series), section VII.
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Good sense, like fruits, is rais'd by toil; But follies sprout in ev'ry soil.
Some of his earlier satires may be located in issues of the Boston chronicle (1769), signed "The Meddler," and of the Connecticut journal (1770 and 1773), signed "The Corre- spondent." While he was studying law in the office of John Adams in Boston he wrote a political satire, An elegy on the times and the first canto of M'Fingal, a modern epic poem, which was "Printed and sold by William and Thomas Bradford, at the London Coffee House, Phila- delphia." The second canto, with the first, was issued in Philadelphia, Boston, and London in 1776. The first edi- tion of the completed poem in four cantos was printed by Hudson & Goodwin of Hartford in 1782. More than forty editions of this satire appeared during the next seventy- five years.
The first and second cantos are more spontaneous than the later parts. In the third canto, however, was the famous description of the "tar and feather" process which was declaimed by schoolboys of later generations; another stanza, often quoted, was the recantation by M'Fingal:
I here renounce the Pope, the Turks, The King, the Devil and all their works; And will, set me but once at ease, Turn Whig or Christian, what you please.
John Trumbull married Sarah Hubbard of New Haven after his return from Boston; he practised law for a time in New Haven but by 1784 moved to Hartford where he made his residence for many years. He served in the legislature and as judge of the supreme court of errors. His last six years were spent in the home of his daughter in Detroit where he died in 1831. He suffered from fre- quent attacks of illness, perhaps resultant from too much LIX
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study and too little physical activity in his youth. The publication of his Poetical works (2 vols., Hartford, 1820) by Samuel G. Goodrich (Peter Parley) gave satisfaction to the author and his friends but the publisher "quietly pocketed a loss of about a thousand dollars."
V
SHORTLY after John Trumbull settled in Hartford Dr. Lemuel Hopkins came thither to establish himself. Born in 1750, a native of the parish of Salem, now the town of Naugatuck, he had from his youth been interested in medicine. His studies were pursued under Dr. Jared Potter of Wallingford and Dr. Seth Bird of Litchfield, after which he had a brief experience of service in the Revolutionary War. For over sixteen years, until his death in 1801, he was a man of marked personality and influence in Hartford and the surrounding towns. His medical skill and his brusque wit were long remembered. The Hopkins Medical Society, founded in 1826, was a memorial to him. He led attacks upon every kind of quackery. One of the familiar tales is his challenge to a quack doctor who had left some "fever powders" as a cure for a girl who was dying of tuberculosis. With Dr. Mason Cogswell, Dr. Hopkins, who was acknowledged as a specialist in the treatment of tuberculosis, was visiting this patient. He read on the wrapper over the powders the warning, "one and a half powders was the maximum that was safe to take." He calmly mixed twelve of the powders in molasses and said to his colleague, as he swallowed the mixture, "Cogswell, I am going to Coven- try today. If I die from this you must write on my tombstone, 'Here lies Hopkins, killed by Grimes.'" In fact, Hopkins possessed an unusually discriminating knowledge of tuberculosis and appreciated its curability.
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In letters which he wrote to his friend, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., which are in manuscript at the Connecticut His- torical Society, are passages of keen wit and sane phi- losophy of living. Here are sage comments that are relevant today:
The more a man is among all sorts of people, the more fully will he learn the unmeasured difference there is between the sentiments of newspapers, replete with local politics, and the opinions of an enlighten'd people in the peaceful and success- ful pursuit of wealth & happiness. . .. I find more and more that a busy set of wrongheads can at pleasure stir up, for a time, any sentiments they please in cities-and that there is a great aptitude in most men to consider cities as worlds, or at least as the manufactories of sentiments for whole countries- and much of this may be true in the old world; but in N. England the contrary is, and ever will be true, as long as our schools, presses and Town-corporations last.
Goodrich, in his Recollections of a lifetime, pictured the eccentric personality of this progressive physician and witty writer who, he said, "in point of genius stood at the head of the noted literary fraternity of 'Hartford Wits'":
He was often described to me as long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling legs. His nose was long, lean, and flexible; his eyes protruding, and his whole expression a strange mixture of solemnity and drollery. He was of a social disposition, and often in talking at a neighbor's house, would forget his business engagements. He was intimate with Theodore Dwight, and his daughter has told me that she recollects his coming to their house, and being very much fatigued, he laid himself down on the floor, and put a log of wood under his head for a pillow. Here he began to dictate poetry, which her father wrote down.
As an author Dr. Hopkins mingled acrid satire with wholesome sentiment. He was represented by several poems in Poets of Connecticut (Hartford, 1843), edited by Charles W. Everest, among them "Poland," "Gen.
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Wayne and the West," "On Gen. Ethan Allen" and "Lines on the Yellow Fever." More simple and typical of this physician and patriot are these lines from The guillotina :
Spread Knowledge then; this only Hope, Can make each eye a telescope, Frame it by microscopic art, To scan the hypocritic heart.
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A CLOSE friend of Dr. Hopkins was Theodore Dwight, younger brother of Timothy Dwight, religious poet and president of Yale College. Theodore Dwight was born in Northampton in 1764, and passed his early years on a farm where wolves and wildcats were occasional neigh- bors. When he was twenty years old he injured his wrist so badly that his career as a farmer was ended-"so he became a student." In Goodrich's Recollections he was credited with "the most brilliant fancy and playful wit" of the Hartford group of writers. He had "black, flashing eyes and a lip that curled easily in laughter or satire." His fund of learning was matched by that of anecdote. "Lines on the death of Washington" was one of the best poems by Theodore Dwight. To the Echo he contributed some of the most vivacious lines; among them was "The triumph of democracy" (January I, 1801), which was issued separately later and listed as his composition. In mock-heroics he rejoiced at the favor shown to Jefferson, with scornful references to the alliance between Jefferson and Aaron Burr and the resulting election contest:
Let every voice with triumph sing- JEFFERSON is chosen king ! Ring every bell in every steeple, T'announce the 'Monarch of the People!'
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Stop-ere your civic feasts begin, Wait 'till the votes are all come in; Perchance, amid this mighty stir, Your Monarch may be Col. BURR!
Dwight was a lawyer and a writer of strong prose as well as of satiric verse. After enriching the columns of the Courant with his New Year's verses and other contribu- tions, he edited, from 1809 to 1815, the Connecticut mirror, the Hartford organ of the Federalist party. After serving in 1814 as secretary of the Hartford Convention3 he moved to New York where, from 1817 to 1835, he "conducted" the New York Daily advertiser. In 1833 he wrote a History of the Hartford Convention with a review of the policy of the United States government which led to the War of 1812. He captured interest by the opening words of challenge:
No political subject that has ever occupied the attention or excited the feelings of the great body of the people of these United States, has ever been the theme of more gross misrepre- sentation or more constant reproaches than the assembly of delegates from several of the New England states, which met at Hartford in the state of Connecticut, in December, 1814, commonly called the Hartford Convention. It has been reviled by multitudes of persons who were totally unacquainted with its objects and by not a few who probably were ignorant even of the geographical position of the place where the convention was held.
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THE wife of Theodore Dwight was Abigail Alsop, sister of the most genuine poet in this group of Hartford writers, Richard Alsop. He was the fifth Richard in direct descent from the ancestor who came to this coun- try and settled in Newtown on Long Island. The fortunes 3 See W. E. Buckley, Hartford Convention (no. XXIV in this series).
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of the Alsop family increased through investments in land in this country and trade with the West Indies, so that the father of the poet left an estate of £34,818 in Connecticut, besides investments in Long Island. Rich- ard, the eldest child, was born in 1761 in Middletown. His mother, Mary Wright, was a woman of charm, wisdom, and courage.
Though Richard prepared for Yale, he preferred to carry on his studies in languages and sciences according to his own tastes. One of his earliest literary projects was to be "A history of Scandinavia; an epic." He spent much time in New York and Hartford but his home was in Middletown. He was deeply interested in botany and birdlore as well as in the history of the literatures of Italy and Spain. In the Diary of William Dunlap, Ameri- ca's early dramatist, there are frequent references to his friendship with Richard Alsop and the latter's sister, Fanny, and visits to their homes in Middletown and Hartford. Thus, in November, 1797, they discussed Saint-Pierre's Études de la nature and recent poetry, and went out shooting ducks on the river. "After dinner Richard & self ride up to Hartford in his Chair, arrive in the evening and drink tea at Theodore's [Dwight ] where Miss Fanny Alsop now is."
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