Will D. Howe

“ During the period that followed the Revolution the colonists doubtless told their stories of war and sea, “swapped yarns,” and recounted deeds of adventure along the frontier, but little has remained to show the character of the writing and to enable us to know what impression it made upon the time. There was not a little humorous political and satirical verse. Certain writers, like William Austin, Irving, Paulding, Drake, Halleck, Sands, Verplanck, brought into American literature an estimable sort of humour, but little was produced by any of them that had an emphatically native quality. ”

“ Her benevolent face, her use of catnip tea, her faith in the almanac, her domestic virtue, and her knowledge of the most significant facts in the life of every person in the village immediately made a large circle of readers recognize the lifelike portrayal of a person known in every American community. ”

“ He had many and varied experiences and in them all saw nothing but humanity. He wrote of people and of their doings, not unkindly or profanely, but always as a moralist, waging warfare with abounding good humour upon all things that were merely sentimental and insincere and doing good service by exposing them in vivid caricatures. ”

“ In the eighteenth century humour assumed a more important place in American literature, being represented less by naïve recitals of incongruous situations and incidents and more by a conscious recognition of the incongruity. ”

“ The evenings in which it appears between these last stages are beautifully illumined by its clear, mellow light. As a Western humorist, the first to introduce the spirit of the Pacific Coast into humorous literature, he influenced his admirer, Mark Twain, and as a writer of easy, fertile monologue he anticipated “Josh Billings,” and “Artemus Ward,” two of his most famous successors.
For the present discussion there remain three men who, in the history of American humour, stand out more prominently than all others from colonial days to Mark Twain: Henry Wheeler Shaw, “Josh Billings” (1818–85) ”

“ Also haunting, but sad, is Melville’s A Dirge for McPherson——
True fame is his, for life is o’er Sarpedon of the mighty war—— while his Sheridan at Cedar Creek, The Fall of Richmond, and The Surrender at Appomattox, though never widely known, are full of that distinction which Melville, with all his irregularities, was never long without, in prose or verse. Thomas Buchanan Read’s famous Sheridan’s Ride is a better ballad than Melville’s piece on the same theme, but purely as poetry it is inferior. ”

“ Two Forms of American Humour: Classical and Native. Although American literature was, even at the beginning, not without its humour, much of the early writing which seems to us whimsical and amusing may have had no humorous appeal for contemporary readers. From an early period, however, we can discern symptoms of the two kinds of humour which were to be represented by American writers: the one following closely English models, especially Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Goldsmith in the eighteenth century, and Lamb, Hood, Jerrold, and Dickens in the nineteenth century ”

“ The New Humour of the Thirties. About the time of Andrew Jackson, along with the birth of popular national self-consciousness, the emergence of the frontier as a social entity in the nation’s imagination, and the rise to power of the newspaper (for almost without exception the professional American humorists have been newspapermen) , the kind of humour that we think of as American took on new life. ”

“ Energy and swift movement are not his only qualities. In the midst of The Bay Fight he does not forget the actual men engaged. He can pass from scenes of fighting to the calm, sad picture of Lincoln watching from on high the troops that have not returned for the Grand Review in Washington. Perhaps nothing in his verse seems more striking, in the twentieth century, than his terrific confidence in the cause of the Union and equally terrific condemnation of all Southern “traitors.” His moral energy is as much the secret of his power as are his poetical vigour and veracity.
§ 4. Boker ”

“ Boker, On Board the Cumberland; Melville, The Cumberland; Weir Mitchell, How the Cumberland Went Down,—all of them poems which, with a larger eloquence than then appeared, sounded the knell of the wooden battleship. As might have been expected, defeat had more poets than victory; Boker, however, wrote The Cruise of the Monitor, and Lucy Larcom The Sinking of the Merrimac. For the capture of New Orleans there were Boker’s The Ballad of New Orleans and The Varuna (the name of a Federal ship sunk during the action) , while Brownell’s The River Fight was as triumphant as the attack. ”

“ It must suffice barely to mention a number of the earlier volumes of American humour which attained popularity but which today are known only to the student. David Crockett’s Autobiography (1834) may not belong here, though it is certainly one of the raciest of all the books in its kind.
Crayon Sketches (1833) , by William Cox (d. 1851) , an English journalist working in New York, consists of a series of amusing essays contributed to The New York Mirror, satirizing the literary infirmities of the times and hitting off well-known actors. ”

“ Holmes [3] belong to what we may call the classical tradition; the present chapter is concerned with those aspects of American humour which are more essentially native, at least in form and tone.
The great period of American humorous writing has been the last three quarters of the nineteenth century. For all the preceding periods a very brief sketch must here suffice. In the seventeenth century the conditions of colonial life were not propitious to any sort of writing, humorous or other. ”

“ Effect upon the Poets. Readers of poetry in the fifties had enjoyed the verse of Bryant [1] and Longfellow [2] and of others who modestly portrayed aspects of quiet nature, mildly moralized upon conduct, or willingly submitted to the spell of beauty. For not a few of the poets, poetry was something apart from the actuality of life, too often little more than commonplace sentiment inspired by earlier poets. ”

“ A widely travelled New York naval officer, Henry Augustus Wise (1819–69) , wrote several extravagant volumes of sea exploits, of which Tales for the Marines (1855) was probably best known. Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1815–78) , a Massachusetts man who went as a journalist to Louisiana and became known as the author of highly coloured tales of the South-west, adopted the name of “Tom Owen, the Bee-Hunter,” an eccentric person who had picturesque adventures on the frontier. ”

“ New England’s Annoyances (1630) , [4] a piece of anonymous doggerel, shows that even the Puritans could smile as they regarded some of their discomforts. Nathaniel Ward [5] wrote The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America (1647) , which Moses Coit Tyler called “the most eccentric and amusing book that was produced in America during the colonial period,” although Ward insisted that it should be accepted as a trust-worthy account of the spiritual state of New England. John Josselyn, who wrote New England’s Rareties (1672) , declared that most of what he wrote was true ”

“ Less important than Brownell as a war poet was George Henry Boker, [8] a native of Pennsylvania, who, though primarily a dramatist, was from 1861 to 1871 the efficient secretary of the Union League of Philadelphia, and prominent in patriotic activities throughout the struggle. ”

“ They furnished sharp satire upon civil and military affairs in the darker days of the war. Lincoln read with great satisfaction their burlesque of the unescapable office-seeker of the time. The lampooning seems rather reckless today and the characterization overbroad. ”

“ The great present seemed to engulf the petty troubles and ill feelings, social and political, of the past, and the people of the North found themselves moved by a national spirit which knew few of the bounds of the old provincialism. ”

“ To secure the means of a livelihood was a practical problem which left little time for the cultivation of the more genial side of life. In bleak surroundings where there was little physical comfort, and under the gloom of Puritanism, most writers were practical and serious. ”

“ H. H. Brownell. The purpose of this chapter is to tell not of the major poets of the mid-century period, most of whom, in the intervals of full poetic careers traced elsewhere in this history, lent powerful voices to the cause of anti-slavery and union, but of some of the lesser figures whose best or most significant work deals almost wholly with the conflict. At least one of them has not received his due share of praise—Henry Howard Brownell (1820–1872) , called by Holmes “Our Battle Laureate.” ”

“ Derby: “John Phœnix”. George Horatio Derby (1823–61) has been called the real father of the new school of humour which began to flourish toward the middle of the nineteenth century. His sketches, with the signature “John Phœnix,” began to appear about 1850, and were afterwards collected in two volumes, Phœnixiana (1855) and Squibob Papers (1859) . Derby had graduated from West Point, had served in the Mexican War, and, as an engineer, had been engaged in surveying in the West and South. ”

“ Although his verse lacks metrical skill, it is vigorous and full of feeling, generally free of animosities, and in the tone of the soldier rather than of the bitter poet who stays at home.
§ 6. The Events of the Conflict Traced in Contemporary Poems; John Brown; Secession; The Call to Arms. To get a really vivid idea of the lyric expression of the time one should look less to individual writers or groups of writers than to the subjects which were most commonly their themes. ”

“ Also popular was the anonymous Tardy George, that is, General McClellan, of whom the North demanded more activity than he ever attained. In the same cause, though without the mention of names, was Wanted—A Man, by Stedman, who shortly after had to write another elegy, Kearny at Seven Pines, upon the gallant officer commemorated by Boker in the Dirge for a Soldier. Thomas Dunn English’s The Charge by the Ford and Melville’s Malvern Hill deal with the later events of McClellan’s first campaign. ”

“ The secession of South Carolina called forth the earnest, affectionate Brother Jonathan's Lament for Sister Caroline by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Stedman and Brownell were but two of the many stirred to verse by the attack on Sumter. The spirit of the volunteers was celebrated in A Call to True Men by Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Who's Ready? ”

“ The Ollapodiana Papers, in the style of a more boisterous Lamb, were contributed to The Knickerbocker Magazine [10] by Willis Gaylord Clark (1810–41) , whose twin brother, Lewis Gaylord Clark (d. 1873) , for a long time editor of the Knickerbocker, was an accomplished journalist and humorist of the chatting sort. ”