Even compared to other early American novels, Samuel
Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom (1818)
is a real mess. Set in the wake of the War of 1812, it is—among other things—a factual
history of the War culled from Woodworth’s newspaper; a compilation of
biographies of the War’s heroes; a series of meditations on nationalism and
patriotism; a sentimental romance; a sequence of seduction plots; a medley of
plays; and a coming-of-age story, advised by a “Mysterious Chief,” who may or
may not be the ghost of George Washington. According to the few considerations
of the novel, this messiness is due to the work’s position as a first, the
first historical romance written by a US citizen (Michael T. Gilmore); a first attempt
at developing a modern national culture (Joseph J. Letter); a first example of
“ghosting” Native Americans (Renée Bergland). As a “first,” the novel is
necessarily messy. The Champions of
Freedom is a helpful starting place because, really, it can only get better
from here.
Of course, as Karen A. Weyler and Michelle Burnham, this
seminar’s organizers, have recently argued, “origin stories matter: beginnings
beget endings” (655). And The Champions
of Freedom is a natural—if messy—beginning to stories that end with the
rise of the US historical novel, with American nationalism, or with Jackson’s
policies on Native Americans. However, I am not only interested in Woodworth’s
novel as a starting-point. I’m also interested in how The Champions of Freedom is the
endpoint of the eighteenth-century US novel, that is, the fiction written and
published in the US between 1790 and 1820.
I argue here that the novel is messy because it’s a nineteenth-century text written by someone
in an eighteenth-century profession. Put another way, Woodworth—like most other
novel-writers of the eighteenth century—is not a novelist so much as he is an
intellectual. The term “intellectual” recognizes the pre-professional role of
writers of early US novels before the novel became a lucrative endeavor. It also
appreciates the range of intellectual work across a diverse array of genres and
formats of publication. Additionally, the term—which recalls Antonio Gramsci’s
“organic intellectuals”— acknowledges Woodworth’s commitment to the Democratic
Republican party, the coalition that became hegemonic following the declension
of the Federalists. As such, The
Champions of Freedom not only lays the groundwork for the
nineteenth-century historical novel, but also helps to crystalize the position
of the novelist and the novel genre before the professionalization of
authorship.
If we read The
Champions of Freedom as the endpoint of the early American novel, we must
acknowledge that while Woodworth may be the “native precursor” to James
Fenimore Cooper, his professional position was quite distinct from his
successor (Gilmore 642). Cooper and Washington Irving are generally recognized
as the first financially successful novelists in the US. For a variety of reasons—some
legal, some technological, some aesthetic—no novelist before 1820 realized
anything like Cooper’s financial success. And none of the most successful and
prolific early American writers devoted themselves to primarily to writing
novels. Rather, most did what Woodworth did; they had alternate professions and
wrote across a range of genres and formats of publication. Indeed, Woodworth
was not, or even primarily, a novelist. He was also a journalist, printer,
poet, song lyricist, playwright, editor, and publisher of various newspapers
and magazines.
Moreover, when we consider Woodworth’s various publications
as a whole, a clear ideological project emerges. Of course, some of his
best-known work appears nonpartisan. The song “The Bucket” (1818), for example,
is a brief piece of youthful nostalgia in which the narrator remembers his
idyllic childhood on the farm, drinking from the old-oaken bucket that hung
from the well. Diving deeper into his corpus, however, reveals Woodworth’s deep
commitment to the Democratic Republican party. His first known poem “New Haven,
A Poem, Satirical and Sentimental” (1809), for example, features an ironical
muse who mocks the Federalist bastion and takes shots at Yale and the Hartford
Wits. His play The Forest Rose; Or, An
American Farmer (1825) also promotes many prominent Democratic Republican
themes. It tells the story of a countrywoman who, pursued by an urbane English
villain, is saved by Jonathan Ploughboy, a stalwart American farmer. Perhaps
most telling is Woodworth’s short-lived The
War (1812-1814), a newspaper dedicated to espousing pro-war rhetoric and
condemning anti-war Federalists as internal enemies.
In this way, then, The
Champions of Freedom is an attempt—not unlike his poetry, plays, and
newspaper writings—to codify and disperse the ideology of his intellectual
network. However, whereas the reading audience of his poetry and newspaper
writings was perhaps more limited, the novel genre had the potential of
reaching a larger, more general, audience.
Indeed, it is clear from the novel’s preface that Woodworth
has his audience in mind. He writes that although the history of the War of
1812 is an important “monument to American patriotism and bravery,” it will
likely be for many readers “a disagreeable and tiresome monotony” (v). For this
reason, his novel is an attempt to make this history more readable. “In many
respects I have studied the interest of the reader alone,” he writes, “by
making short paragraphs, lessening the length of a chapter when its subject is
dull, and increasing when the incidents are interesting” (viii). More
important, however, is the commingling of “Romance” with the “most correct and
History of the War, that has yet appeared.” Combining the two, he explains,
will help “to furnish…relief without alluring from the subject—to soften the
rough notes of the bugle by the gentler tone of the lyre—to mingle the flowers
of fancy with the laurels of victory—and to shift the scene occasionally from
the hostile camp to the mansion of love” (v). The novel, in other words, is a
kind of compromise: the fictional exploits of the protagonist will ultimately
make the average reader more likely to appreciate the historical accounts of
the War.
The Champions of
Freedom, in the words of Cathy Davidson, is thus “an attempt to sell history” (103). And it is a
particularly partisan history that minimizes defeat and dissent—two sentences
are dedicated to describing the burning of Washington while only one discusses
the Hartford Convention—while concurrently amplifying victory, especially naval
victories and Jackson’s battle of New Orleans. It is important to note,
however, that the novel claims to sell a national—rather than a Democratic
Republican—form of history. In fact, the novel’s protagonist is often warned
against becoming “the slave or the tool of a sect or party” (87).
Again, this is why the novel is such an instructive “first.”
As one of the first historical novels, it appears as an initial attempt to shape
and define the surge in nationalism following the War. Incidentally, it also
helps to reveal the US historical novel’s ideological origins. In addition to
Woodworth, Cooper and James Kirke Paulding were advocates for the Democratic
Republican party. As such, the US historical novel emerges as a bid for
cultural hegemony less concerned with creating an encompassing nationalism than
with making their coalition’s ideology appear universal.
But what if we again consider it, again, not only as the
first US historical novel but also as one of the last early American novels? It
would require us, for one, to view it in comparison to the cluster of other
novels written before 1820 focused on the War of 1812.
In sum, many of these novels are written by intellectuals
for the opposing Federalist Party who are critical of the War and view the nation
as fundamentally divided. These include William Jenks’s Memoir of the Northern Kingdom (1808) wherein the narrator gives an
alternative history of the United States as one divided between an aristocratic
Northern Kingdom and a republican Southern Kingdom; The Adventures of Uncle Sam in Search of His Lost Honor (1816), in
which the difference between the North and South is personified in the figures
of Tom Boston and Salgado, respectively, who both try to influence Uncle Sam
regarding the upcoming War with John Bull; and The Yankee Traveller (1817) and Thomas Bigelow and Nathan Hale’s War of the Gulls (1812), which both
feature similar internal divisions.
Ultimately, this comparison, in which The Champions of Freedom is a clear outlier, helps to demonstrate
why the novel’s messy position is particularly illuminating. On the one hand,
Woodworth’s is an eighteenth-century intellectual, rather than as a
nineteenth-century novelist. In this way, his profession mirrors his
better-known eighteenth-century counterparts. Most held other occupations including
law (Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Royall Tyler), ministry (Jeremy Belknap and Enos
Hitchcock), and education (Susanna Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster). And while
they are now remembered for their novels, like Woodworth, they all wrote across
a range of genres (essays, histories, dramas, poems, sermons) and formats and
publications (magazines, newspapers, and public performances).[1]
On the other hand, as an intellectual for the Democratic
Republicans, Woodworth is an outlier among these better-known intellectuals.
Indeed, most eighteenth-century intellectuals belonged to an urban bloc that
coalesced following the suppression of Shays’s Rebellion, achieved hegemony
with the ratification of the Constitution, and came to call themselves the
Federalist Party. Though he is best-known today as the author of The Power of Sympathy (1789), William
Hill Brown was most famous in the eighteenth century for his poetry, which
included “Shays to Shattuck”(1787), which depicts the leader of Shays’s
Rebellion as a manipulative demagogue and “Yankee Song” (1788), which
celebrates the drafting of the Constitution. Before penning The Algerine Captive (1797), Royall
Tyler served as an officer in General Lincoln’s anti-Shaysite militia, and The Contrast (1787) mocks Shaysites in
its portrayal of Yankee Jonathan. Similarly, following the serial publication
of The Foresters (1787-1788), Jeremy
Belknap criticized an uprising similar to Shays’s Rebellion in Exeter, New
Hampshire in The History of New Hampshire
(1791). The suppression of the Exeter uprising was mobilized by Nathan
Gilman, the father of Tabitha Gilman Tenney, whose Female Quixotism (1801) also parodies backwoods agrarians. In
addition, the majority of other intellectuals demonstrate a conservative
agenda: Samuel Relf, author of Infidelity
(1797) later edited the Federalist Relf’s
Gazette, and Judith Sargent Murray’s serialized novel Margaretta (1792-1794) endorses the Adams administration. This trend
continues into the 1800s: William Jenks, Thomas Hale Pettengill, Martha
Meredith Read, Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, Caroline Warren Thayer, and many others were
New England conservatives even as this position became more tenuous following,
first, the Revolution of 1800, and, then, the War of 1812. In this light, then,
The Champions of Freedom is another
“first,” one of the first novels to be written by an intellectual committed to the
Democratic Republicans following the collapse of Federalism.
The Champions of
Freedom’s position as a nineteenth-century novel written by an
eighteenth-century intellectual is one of the main reasons it is such a mess.
However, it is also what makes it such a revelatory text. Indeed, Woodworth, as
one of the last eighteenth-century intellectuals helps to crystallize the
position of the so-called “novelists” of the eighteenth century, revealing them
to be committed to a particular ideology that attempts to disperse it across a
range of genres and formats of publication. Additionally, its position as one
of the first historical novels helps to reveal the ideological origins of
post-War of 1812 nationalism. Lastly, and more broadly, it demonstrates how the
early American novel was an integral piece of the volatile class conflicts of
the early national period.
Works Cited
Bergland, Renée L. The
National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover: U of
Dartmouth P, 2000.
Davidson, Cathy. Revolution
and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Gilmore, Michael T. “The Novel.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Letter, Joseph J. “Reincarnating Samuel Woodworth: Native
American Prophets, the Nation, and the War of 1812.” Early American Literature 43.3 (2008): 687-713.
Weyler, Karen A., and Michelle Burnham. “Reanimating Ghost
Editions, Reorienting the Early American Novel.” Early American Literature 51:3 (2016): 655-664.
Woodworth, Samuel. The
Champions of Freedom; or The Mysterious Chief. New York: Charles N.
Baldwin, 1818.
[1] Many so-called “novels” of the early national period are such a hodgepodge of
generic conventions published in a variety of formats that they bear only a
passing resemblance to what we would call novels. The term “intellectual” thus
eases the burden on defining these works as novels.
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