Recovering the Poetry & Influence of the British

University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2017 Fugitive Verses & Faded Histories: Recovering The Poetry & Influence Of The rB itish American Loyalists Michael C. Weisenburg University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Weisenburg, M. C.(2017). Fugitive Verses & Faded Histories: Recovering The Poetry & Influence Of The British American Loyalists. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4457 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FUGITIVE VERSES & FADED HISTORIES: RECOVERING THE POETRY & INFLUENCE OF THE BRITISH AMERICAN LOYALISTS by Michael C. Weisenburg Bachelor of Arts Stony Brook University, 2006 Master of Arts The College at Brockport, 2009 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts & Sciences University of South Carolina 2017 Accepted by: David S. Shields, Major Professor Gretchen Weortendyke, Committee Member Leon Jackson, Committee Member Woody Holton, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by Michael C. Weisenburg, 2017 All Rights Reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While often a solitary endeavor, dissertations are never written alone, and I have benefitted from a considerable amount of support, guidance, and encouragement along the way. My studies were bolstered by both the Joel Myerson Fellowship and the William H. Nolte Graduate Assistant Award and early stages of my research were supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship, the latter of which allowed me time and money to do research at the New York Historical Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia. I thank my committee, whose patience and insights have made me a better thinker, writer, and scholar. Woody Holton generously agreed to be my outside reader, which has added an historical richness to the project. Thanks to Leon Jackson, whose broad scholarly knowledge and attention to style’s relationship to argument helped me clarify some especially bewildering problems in earlier drafts; and to Gretchen Woertendyke, who has continually encouraged my ideas and kept me focused on the argument at hand. Many hearty thanks to David Shields, whose direction was kind when correcting a few obvious mistakes that I made early on, was generous with ideas for increasing the stakes of my argument, and who pushed me to expand the project into territories that I had not anticipated. I am deeply indebted to you all. I am lucky to have mentors in Elizabeth Sudduth and Joel Myerson. Elizabeth not only kept me employed but also invited me into the world of rare books scholarship, iii which has had a strong influence on this project. Joel’s friendship has been a moral and intellectual lifesaver – thank you for all of the lunches, the beers, and the advice. Last, though most certainly not least, I thank Erica Fischer, whose love, encouragement, and solidarity have inspired me to keep at it and ultimately achieve my goals. She kept me honest when I was backsliding while also keeping me balanced when I sometimes forgot that there was more to life than three little letters after a name. I could not have written this without her. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation traces the literary history of the British American Loyalists as they spread through the Atlantic and across the North American continent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to reassess our understanding of the origins of cultural nationalism and the early literary history of the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. As a result, it implicitly argues for a reconsideration of American literature as developing in a simultaneously hemispheric and transatlantic response to British Empire. I argue that the Loyalists, through their lived experience of the war, exile, and reincorporation back into the body politic, are necessary to the imaginative conditions of U.S. citizenship and the re-imagination of British Colonial subjecthood. While many reconsiderations of American literature have accounted for the British influence of American culture, none of these studies accounts for those Americans who fought for a desire to keep America British or how such people affected the nascent United States. While American literature defines itself by systematically imitating and appropriating British literature, there exists within it stylistic and historical remnants of the Loyalists and their continued place in American culture throughout the period. The residual effect of the Loyalists on American culture, as well as their role in the historical memory of the origins of the United States yet remains a problem ripe for further literary historical investigation, and it is the goal of this study to fill in such lacuna through the close analyses of select literary touchstones of the period. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER ONE: “AND THOUSAND OTHER ILLS THAT LOYALTY IS HEIR TO”: THE BRITISH AMERICAN LOYALISTS IN THE BRITISH POEMS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION…………………………………………………………….. 36 CHAPTER TWO: EPICS AND ELEGIES: THE MANUSCRIPT POETRY OF THE BRITISH AMERICAN LOYALISTS & THE BATTLE OF BROOKLYN ..................................................72 CHAPTER THREE: “THAT AFFLICTED AND TRYING SEASON”: ROBERT PROUD AND THE PROBLEM OF LOYALIST SUBJECTIVITY .....................................................107 CHAPTER FOUR: FROM JUBILATION TO DISAFFECTION: LOYALIST PERFORMANCE AS A REGISTER OF COMMUNAL AFFECT IN REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA ............137 CHAPTER FIVE: “’TIS ALL WELL, AND THE SUFFERING WORLD MUST REMAIN PASSIVE AND SILENT”: SUBLIME MELANCHOLY IN CRÈVECOEUR’S LANDSCAPES ............171 CHAPTER SIX: LOYALISTS IN TRANSITION: COMPETING CULTURES OF EXILE ..................210 POSTSCRIPT .......................................................................................................................246 REFERENCES .....................................................................................................................255 vi INTRODUCTION This study takes up the literary and affective history of the British American Loyalists during and immediately following the events of the American War for Independence in order to reconsider our understanding of the residual affect that the Loyalists had on American cultural identity and the influence they had on the origins of a national American literature. In so doing, the argument implicitly recalls a disciplinary emphasis to what Ralph Bauer has styled the literature of British America, so called due to its focus on the British literary tradition of the territory that would become the United States.1 As such, I am not calling for a paradigm shift in our understanding of how British colonials expressed themselves, so much as I am tracing an extension and clarification of how the Loyalists, as opposed to their revolutionary counterparts, fit into both a colonial as well as a national American literary tradition.2 The revolutionary period in America witnessed the disruption of the first British Empire and with it, the disruption of residual models of literary expression that had only recently began to solidify into a transatlantic, Anglo-American aesthetic. Greene and Pole have argued that most colonials “shared a common identity as British peoples living in 1 Ralph Bauer, “The Literature of ‘British America’,” American Literary History, 21.4 (2009): 818-835. 2 Given my dual interest in how the Loyalists both expressed themselves poetically and how they influenced the early national period of the United States, I do not engage with post-nationalist arguments of American literary history at any great length. Rather, I show how the loyalist presence is itself an aspect of the formation of a national literary identity. I do not dismiss post-nationalist or imperialist theories of nineteenth-century American literary history, but rather I tell a different, concurrent story. 1 America” who “took pride in the extent to which their societies were becoming increasingly Anglicized.”3 Other proponents of the Anglicization thesis, such as historian T. H. Breen, who has shown how the colonies developed economically and culturally to become more like London as they became increasingly complicit in Britain’s growing commercial empire; and, literary scholars, such as William Spengemann, David S. Shields and Leonard Tennenhouse, who each advocates for the importance of understanding British influences on American literary culture, have made clear that American literature in this period was very much a form of British literature.4 While much of the scholarship has substantially reconceived how we understand the literature of both the colonial and early national period, only a handful of works have addressed the literature produced during the American Revolution in any detail, and most of these works antedate many of the recent theoretical and

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