his Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections. Benjamin Franklin, of whom Turgot the French statesman said: “He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven and the scepter from tyrants,” was the most useful of men. His bent was to the practical in his writings. Poor Richard's Almanac, begun in 1732 and maintained for 25 years, was filled with proverbs in prose and verse, teaching the value of work, honesty and economy: as “Three removes are as bad as a fire” and “Early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Next to the Almanac his most popular work was his Autobiography; but some of his lighter pieces, with their homely wisdom, are equally good, as the famous story of the Whistle, Dialogue between Franklin and the Goat and verses on Paper.
Literature from the Revolution to 1815 was mostly political. The fame of the speeches of Samuel Adams, James Otis and Josiah Quincy in Massachusetts and of Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee in Virginia comes to us mostly by tradition, though Patrick Henry's speeches are preserved at least in substance. The most famous is his speech in the convention of delegates ending with the well-known sentence: “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” The political essays of such patriots as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren and Hastings, published in the newspapers, greatly helped the course of liberty. Among them were the Circular Letter to Each Colonial Legislature of Adams and Otis, Quincy's Observations on the Boston Port-Bill and Otis' Rights of the British Colonies. The Declaration of Independence is credited to Thomas Jefferson. Another noteworthy writing of his was his first Inaugural Address. His Notes on Virginia contain a fine description of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge. The great orator of the Federal party was Alexander Hamilton, whose finest speech perhaps is the one On the Expediency of Adopting the Federal Constitution. But the best thought of the Federal party is contained in the 85 papers, called The Federalist, written by Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. The best known of Washington's writings is his Farewell Address. During John Adams' administration the best Federal orator was Fisher Ames, whose best speech was made in Congress in 1796 on the British treaty. Thomas Paine came to Philadelphia from England in 1774, and wrote his Common Sense and Crisis in aid of the colonial cause. His pamphlets were popular, easily understood by plain people, and did great service to the American cause. He afterwards went to France, where he wrote his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, his best-known work.
The popular poem of Revolutionary times was John Trumbull's McFingal, a satire on the American loyalists or tories. Droll and genuinely humorous, it is one of the best American political satires. Many of its lines have become proverbs, as the couplet:
| “ | No man e'er felt the halter draw |
| With good opinion of the law.” |
Joel Barlow, whose huge Columbiad is merely grandiose, wrote one piece of good humor, his Hasty Pudding. A number of ballads had wide circulation. Yankee Doodle was the outgrowth of the Revolution, the chorus being taken from an old Dutch song and first applied in derision to the colonists by British soldiers. A popular humorous ballad was The Battle of the Kegs, written by Francis Hopkinson, whose son Joseph wrote Hail Columbia. Much better than Hail Columbia is The Star-Spangled Banner, written during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1812, by Francis Scott Key. The first real American poet was Philip Freneau, whose best poems are Wild Honeysuckle, Indian Student and Indian Burying-Ground, the last of which was highly praised by Sir Walter Scott. Another American to receive high praise abroad was John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, of whose Journal Charles Lamb wrote: “Get the writings of John Woolman by heart, and love the early Quakers.”
The time between 1815 and 1837 has been called the era of good feeling. The Mississippi valley was being rapidly settled. “Westward the course of empire takes its way” expressed the feeling of the emigrants; and ideas of the greatness of America, such as the Revolutionary fathers had never imagined, were dawning upon men's minds. It was at this time, when Sydney Smith had sneeringly asked: “Who reads an American book?” that American literature of genuine worth began to be produced. The first of our writers whose books were read for their own sake, and not merely to find out about the men and times described, was Washington Irving. His Sketch Book, in some respects his best work, consists of tales, sketches and essays, two of which, the famous story of Rip Van Winkle and the legend of Sleepy Hollow, he wove from the old Dutch traditions of the Hudson. He used these traditions also in the book which gave him his reputation, Knickerbocker's History of New York, a burlesque account of the old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam. This was a real addition to humorous literature. Irving's most ambitious work, his Life of Washington, remains an authority, but the most notable of his biographies is the Life of Oliver Goldsmith. Joseph Rodman Drake, a promising poet who died when he was only 25, wrote the best of our patriotic lyrics, The American Flag, while his Culprit Fay was the finest poem yet written in America, except Bryant's Thanatopsis (1816). A friend of Drake was Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose Alnwick Castle and especially his Marco Bozzaris will always be remembered.
