American Revolution

Sail on, Oh Ship of State!

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Claude McKay led an outsiders’ life, Allen Ginsberg became a near celebrity bohemian whose outsider status changed over his life. The author of today’s poem in our Independence Day series was more well-known than Ginsberg in his day, and he was as far from being an outsider as any American poet could be. At one time, as many knew and read his poems as Edgar Guest’s, and he was a much better versifier.

So, do you know today’s poem from the above title, or from the name of the longer work from which it’s excerpted, “The Building of the Ship?”   It’s highly unlikely that you would. The American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow went from being the stuffy square’s square, the kind of writer that Modernists didn’t want to be, to a forgotten man, the writer that no one remembers even to reject. He was a civic poet, a poet’s role that no longer exists in white America. Along with a handful of other men, most of whom he knew, he sought to create an American poetry in the first half of the 19th century when the American experiment was still new. After all, when he was born in 1817, many who celebrated July 4th were around for the July 4th!   And for much of his life Longfellow lived in a house that George Washington had lived in while commanding the American Revolutionary War troops.

Longfellow_National_Historic_Site,_Cambridge,_Massachusetts

George Washington lived here, and later so did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And a child named Darby Vassall. Haven’t heard of that last one? Read on.

 

In 1855, an elderly man visited that house where he had been born in 1769, meeting with Longfellow there. The man’s name was Darby Vassall, and this was the nature of his birth: he was born to enslaved Afro-Americans owned by the owners of that big house, which made him a slave by law from birth. When the Revolution came, his masters sided with the British, and so after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the owners skedaddled off to safer British-controlled territory. This left the house available for the new Revolutionary Army’s commander, General Washington, as spoils of war. Washington left his short-term smaller quarters and went to the big house to move in.

And here’s the story Darby Vassall liked to tell about meeting The Father of Our Country. There he was, six years old, and the revolution had by accident empirically freed him. He was swinging on the gate of the very house Longfellow now lived in, a time-honored childhood pastime then and now (see also sutures and Colles’ fracture.) General Washington, impressively tall for his time, and like the house’s absent owners, a rich slaveholder who traveled with an enslaved manservant, asked the boy if he would like to work for the new occupant, this man who’d become so honored and famous that people even now buy his portrait for something between 25 cents and a dollar.

Darby kept swinging, sizing up the tall white man, and then asked “How much are you paying?” Darby says Washington kind of lost interest in the conversation at that point—because, you know, slavery. He looked like a gentleman Darby later recounted, but “He was no gentleman.” Now that’s an Independence Day story!

We don’t know all Vassall told Longfellow about the house Longfellow now lived in, but the stories must have been interesting. The best-selling author blew off a meeting with his publisher to hear them all.

Have I forgotten to talk about Longfellow’s poem? No, this is another poem for our July 4th series. It comes at the end of a much longer poem Longfellow published in 1850, one that less than nobody reads today. The entire “The Building of the Ship”  is an allegorical story of a venerable ship builder* who with the help of a crew including a younger apprentice builds a ship for a merchant, more magnificent than any the builder has ever built. While building the ship, the apprentice and the master ship builder’s daughter fall in love, and the old master promises that on the day the ship launches his daughter and the apprentice will be wed. After many supple verse lines detailing the construction of this ship,** it’s complete and it launches with a epithalamium in which the new and lovely ship is embraced as a bride by the timeless, older, gray sea.

If the poem ended there it’d remain a curio of interest to scholars today, a romance in a European style adapted with distinctive American details and accomplished in English verse with a difficult rhyming scheme that never grates or seems fake, the sort of thing that is easier to do in French or Italian.***  But Longfellow had an envoi of sorts. The ship, as all man-made things do, would eventually wear out and come to a wrecked end. A downbeat, look-at-oneself-through-the-grave warning that would also not be out of place in romanticism.

This whole poem, along with that ending was sent to the publishers.

Then Longfellow called it back. He had a revision, with an entirely new ending. You can read the old ending and the story of the last-minute revision here. Not only is the new ending upbeat, it seemed to retroactively change the poem that proceeded it. That boat-like-a-bride thing was still there, but the ship was named “The Union,” and in those manifests of the things that made the ship, the entire young country seems to be the source. The Union becomes not just a marital union, it becomes the United States.

Here’s where that civic poet role comes into play. In the dozen years leading up to the Civil War, the delicate balance of slavery’s evil in a democratic country was becoming harder and harder to keep from spilling, the compromises seeking to keep the country in existence more and more difficult to negotiate. Longfellow’s new envoi, the one that I perform today, may seem anodyne if considered as an abstract statement of patriotism, but in 1850 it was a considered second-draft meant to say that ideals of the American experiment should continue, needed to continue, because those ideals, those plans, however imperfectly applied are contagious (in a good non-Covid-19 way). Enough for a small 6-year-old to stand up to Washington for example.

Now if we are to consider inspirational Afro-American patriotism, the best story that is likely not true is that Winston Churchill once quoted in a public speech Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,”  a Black man’s valiant ode to self-defense written after the deadly “Red Summer” of 1919, but then applied during the darkest days of Great Britain standing against Nazi-occupied Europe. No one has such a transcript or recording. But there is  a recording of Churchill reading a section of the abolitionist**** Longfellow’s envoi during that time in a speech of endurance in 1940.

 

 

Maybe the strangest thing about this ship and it’s sailing on, even as the maker of the poem has slipped away from public consciousness, was “Sail on, O Ship of State”  being quoted in Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy,”  his excellent ode to the need to continue the American experiment, however flawed, because it’s flawed.

The player gadget to hear my performance of Longfellow’s “Sail On, Oh Ship of State”  is below. I’ll note that my performance has some flaws that I’m accepting for now in order to get this out in a timely manner, but the spirit is there. Happy 4th of July though it be just one date. May freedom and independence come to all of us. The revolution is plural.

 

 

 

 

*Though Longfellow lived and wrote much of his work in Cambridge Massachusetts, he was born and educated in Maine, and even at this late hour he probably vies with Stephen King and Edna St. Vincent Millay for the title of most well-known writer from Maine. Maine was a shipbuilding center in the 19th century and so the poems extended allegory of shipmaking was local color to Longfellow.

**I’m no expert here, but those who know about early 19th century American shipbuilding seem to feel that Longfellow got the details of ship design choices and construction right.

***Many prosody theorists think that rhyming English poetry is a mistake, as we have many fewer rhyming word-endings than other European languages. Longfellow’s poetry may not be to modern tastes, but one thing he did have was a non-forced and impressive “flow” in the hip-hop/rap sense.

****Among the favorable reviews from abolitionists: Thomas Wentworth Higginson said of “The Building of the Ship”  “The most complete and artistic which he ever wrote.” Lincoln was said to have quoted the envoi lines in private to his secretary as the Civil War broke out—and broke down in tears before he could finish them.

A Small Puzzle in William Blake’s America, A Prophecy

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’m often fascinated by things that touch the material we use here. Where there’s William Blake, there’s often some mystery, and in reading Blake’s America, A Prophecy,  one small, seemingly mundane thing intrigued me. Several times, in parts of the poem I didn’t use in the selection the LYL Band performed for Independence Day, Blake names real, not spiritual, beings who he views as central figures in the American Revolution from his vantage point across the Atlantic.

Right near the start, in line 4 of his poem, he has it that “Washington, Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock, and Green meet on the coast glowing with blood…” and later “there stands Washington, and Paine, and Warren…” and finally “Washington, Franklin, Paine, and Warren, Allen, Gates and Lee…heard the voice of Albion’s Angel…” For some readers, this would just be a mundane list of names.

This article is for the other kind.

As a grade-school kid, even before I became enamored of poetry, I was a history buff. Washington and Franklin would easily have been known to those following the American Revolution, even across the sea. Paine, would be Tom Paine, who, while not a general or rebel government officer, was a chief propagandist/agitator who traveled to England and Europe to spread the new republican message. Political radicals like Blake would certainly have known of him, and the two writers shared London connections and may have even met. Lee, would be Henry “Light-Horse” Lee, who was both a cavalry officer in the Revolutionary army and an important politician in the American congress. Gates, was Horatio Gates, a General in the American forces. Green, is likely just a typo for Nathanael Greene, another important General on the American side. Allen, would be Ethan Allen, known as a resourceful commander for the colonists’ side in New England. Hancock, he of the big signature on the Declaration of Independence, was a leader in the colonial congress.

Nothing all that shocking in this list of American Revolutionary principals then, and it shows that Blake was at least following those American events, not just communing with his angel visions.

But, there’s one thing that bothered me, and I couldn’t let it go. Who was “Warren?”

If you search on Warren and American Revolution you’ll hit on a remarkable man who was not known to me before wondering about this: Joseph Warren. A Harvard educated physician, he was a leader in the leading rebel center of Boston Massachusetts. Poet Longfellow made Paul Revere and his ride before the dawn of the first battle of the Revolution famous, but it was Warren who sent him to warn Concord that the British were coming.

How did he know that the redcoats were going to make a secret move to round up the leaders of the opposition to British rule? He may have gleaned the info from the wife of the of British commander Thomas Gage. And if you want to follow another rumor, there may have been a little side-action going on between the handsome rebel leader and the British commander’s wife.

Warren fought in those first skirmishes, and when the first pitched battle in the Boston area was forming, Warren (who now had been newly commissioned as a General) deferred to other men in the rebel army who had military experience to lead in the upcoming battle of Bunker Hill. Instead, he asked to fight as a private in the forces. Serving as such, on the front line, he was killed at that battle at age 34. Some who knew him said, that had Joseph Warren lived,  he had the charisma and talents to have out-shown even George Washington.

What a story! And one unknown to me until I thought of looking into that bothersome name in William Blake’s poem.

But, he’s not the only candidate. Joseph Warren died early in the Revolution. He was well known to the British authorities in Boston, but I’m unsure how well known he was in England or to Blake’s radical circle in London. “Warren,” Joseph Warren, is listed as the author of the “Suffolk Resolves” a 1774 public repudiation and refusal to abide by the “Intolerable Acts” made by a Massachusetts organization resisting British rule, and this declaration did receive some notice in England.

There’s another candidate, with connection to Blake’s circle, even though Mercy Otis Warren is, if anything, more obscure than Joseph Warren. Apparently, these two Warren’s are not related, though both were living in colonial Massachusetts. Oh, and Mercy was a woman.

Two Warrens

Too-little-known patriots: Joseph Warren and Marcy Otis Warren

 

I’ve already mentioned that Massachusetts was a hot-bed of resistance to British rule. Mercy was also in the center of those efforts. If one thinks of current political efforts being organized via social media, the 18th Century colonists used good old postal letters to do the same thing, and Mercy Otis Warren was a leader in these Committees of Correspondence. As a woman in that time and place, there was no official position in the colonial government or military forces, but as a writer she was prolific in attacking the offenses of British rule, writing satiric plays, patriotic songs, and pamphlets extoling the cause. Mercy Otis Warren remained a staunch republican after the end of the Revolution, being one of the hard-liners who opposed adopting the Constitution without a Bill of Rights. In 1805, after Blake had published his America poem, Warren published one of the earliest substantial histories of the American Revolution where she warned against authoritarian elements in the Federalist party.

Noting that Blake always placed Warren next to Paine in his lists, I wondered if Mercy Otis Warren was his Warren, as the two were like as polemicists rather than government or military officers, and both wrote of a broad definition of the rights of man. Blake’s late 18th Century London radical circles included a writer and early British feminist Catharine Macaulay who was a friend of the American Mercy Otis Warren. That Blake seems to link women’s emancipation with an end to slavery and colonial oppression in America, A Prophecy  caused me to think that just maybe this woman was his Warren. I even found an article in the University of Bucharest Review from 2013 where its author Ruxandra Topor states that Blake’s Warren is Mercy. The author doesn’t say why they believe this, but so far that’s the single published identification of Blake’s Warren that I’ve found.

However, the vast majority of Mercy Otis Warren’s published revolutionary writing was done anonymously or under pseudonyms. Though she did publish one collection of writing under her own name in America two years before Blake engraved his book, it seems unlikely Blake would have known her name in 1793. Still, she may have been akin to Paine in her thoughts and actions, and like Paine, she had an ex-officio importance to the Revolution. Remarkably, she may have done all that, risking all for her country despite an 18th Century glass ceiling—and she’s someone else that I first heard about because of this list of names in Blake’s poem.

America, A Prophecy

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

July 4th is celebrated in the U. S. as Independence Day, the day that our congress signed a declaration of independence from the British Empire. I know this project has an international audience. So, why celebrate a provincial event here?

Because the American Revolution was not simply a patriotic event. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that its initial battle was “the shot heard round the world.” What was so singular about it? It was not merely an anti-colonialist act—after all empires have had rebellious provinces forever, and empires always fall—but it was also an act that founded the modern democratic republic. Overthrowing a colonial government, as the American patriots did, is not in itself a remarkable event. I don’t mean to denigrate the sacrifices, the risks, they took. I don’t mean to overlook the evils inherent in armed struggle. I won’t today seek to re-litigate the proximate issues of the Revolutionary War, with its details of commercial interests (including, yes, commercial interests in human properties) and debate the best tactics for redress of grievances. No, those are all important, but they are not what makes the American Revolution worth our unique attention today.

signing the declaration

Silent thoughts in the room: What a fine statement of the Rights of Man we sign today! I hope they wrap this up before traffic on the turnpike gets crazy. None of my slaves have learned to read, right? Why am I the only one wearing a hat? I can’t get tickets to Hamilton? I am Hamilton!  All middle-age white guys, when does the prog-rock concert start?

 

Americans did not replace a king with a president for life. They didn’t exchange one dictator for another. They were not, in the end, interested in only replacing a bad man with what seemed to be a good man, and job-done. They instead instituted an imperfect, constantly challenged and constantly changing structure based on human rights and rule by reason and popular consent. The struggles, the risks of the Revolutionary generation were indeed great, but they pale in contrast to the struggles and risks born by the successor generations who sought to maintain and improve those structures. So, this is not a holiday honoring a person, a generation, or a concluding event, but instead, it is one marking a beginning.

Today’s piece was not written by an American, but by an Englishman who followed those revolutionary 18th Century events, but dealt with them on a spiritual plane: William Blake. The words come from his self-created 1793 book America, A Prophecy,  which he wrote, lettered, illustrated, and printed himself. It’s not an account of the actual battles, and its characters are largely his own imaginary beings, but he never lets his visionary eye fall away from what he sees as the core struggle in the events. It’s spiritual—not in sense of its fantastic stage—but in the sense of its divining the essence of the battle: human beings being held back from their potential and dignity by corrupt structures.

America_a_Prophecy_copy_a_plate_08

A plate from William Blake presenting part of today’s song

 

In our worldly plane, the men who signed that declaration were all men, all white men, mostly men of property, and yes, we should remember that some of those men of property’s properties were indeed other men, women, and children. Blake explicitly understood that. In his prophecy, the essence that they are declaring for, the angelic forces that cry for freedom and dignity are for all nations, for all genders. If the American structure had to struggle for generations to refuse slavery and give full citizenship to women, Blake says that, in essence, and in the philosophy of their republican structures and statements, they have already declared those evils as tyranny, even if they don’t perceive that yet.

It’s almost a reverse Faustian bargain, isn’t it? Instead of the devil tricking them to eternal slavery, freedom’s angels have them agreeing to dissolve their allegiance to a bad king—but the codicils they have signed declare for more than that! They’ve put their lives on the line to declare that humans have inalienable rights and that governments must work with the consent of the governed. How entirely can they understand what that entails? July 4th 1776 is a Thursday. Some are no doubt thinking of Friday; the men of foresight, to the possible course of the rest of the war; the wisest, perhaps, are thinking, of what, a generation ahead?

The sections I use from William Blake’s America, A Prophecy  are spoken by an angelic character he calls Orc, who personifies the overturning of the old tyrannies. With the limits of our short-piece format I’ve tried to give some flavor of what Blake understood was being overturned by the American Revolution. Musically, it’s a simple structure, though not the most common of chord progressions.  I tried to chant Blake’s words with as much passion as I could in this one-take performance by the LYL Band. If you are in the U. S., enjoy your cylindrical explosives and tubular sausages, but do not mix the two things up. Their shapes are similar, but keep your mind on their essences. The performance of an excerpt from William Blake’s America, A Prophecy  can be played with the gadget below.