Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism: “The Rising Glory of America” without Brackenridge

Philip Freneau’s “The Rising Glory of America” is an exciting poem, arguably the most important American poem of its age. Its composition is entangled in the historical events that created American independence, and it was written by a poet who (later) probably had more direct influence on the country’s politics than any other poet in America’s history. The poem articulates many of the formative myths in the cultural imagination that brought the American nation into being: the translatio studii and translatio imperii ideas that resurfaced in the nineteenth century as “manifest destiny”; the conflicting Anglophilia and Anglophobia of England’s rebellious offspring; the conflicting Whiggish trust in progress versus a romantic noble savagism; the so-called leyenda negra of depraved Spanish colonization; and the complementary (and later conflicting) visions of a Hamiltonian future built on commerce, or a Jeffersonian future built on agriculture. The poem culminates in a vision of America as site of the biblical New Jerusalem, descending from the heavens and settling somewhere, roughly, in the vicinity of New Jersey—a vision presented with all its implications of Americans as an exceptional “chosen people,” a light to all nations, under the approving eye of God’s Providence. Yet the author is uncertain about biblical authority, and the poem reveals him in the act of hesitating between biblical literalism and deistic rationalism, as it does in the act of shifting allegiance from a providential to a political future, without making too fine a distinction between them. As such, it is a demonstration piece for Sacvan Bercovich’s familiar thesis about the transformation of biblical myth into political rhetoric. The poem, I would argue, is artfully presented not merely to articulate these primary nationalist mythologies but also to hold them in suspension.

My impulse to write about Freneau arises from the neglect and apparent misunderstanding of a poem that holds such a focal position in the landscape of American poetry. One preliminary step in reclaiming this text is to sever its dual authorship, to consider a work not by “Brackenridge and Freneau,” but by Freneau alone. For even in these sophisticated days of fluid texts and literary collaborations, the ghost of Brackenridge has proved a distraction, even a source of outright error. Brackenridge was, of course, coauthor of the 1772 pre-revolution printing of the poem, some version of which he recited at the Princeton commencement exercises that year. That poem is, in Susan Castillo’s words, “a complex and many-layered document, in which we can note not one but two authorial voices, which often coexist uneasily” (27). True as this may be, the 1772 text is also a confusing jumble, so it remains interesting more as a historical than as a literary work.

Fortunately, the nagging issues of text and authorship have been sorted out in a meticulous bibliographic study by J. F. W. Smeall. The poem began as an address written for the commencement exercises at Princeton in 1771 on the hot topic of the day suggested by the university president John Witherspoon. Since Freneau could not attend, Brackenridge recited the poem as a graduation ode on September 25, 1771, and it was “greeted with great applause,” according to fellow student James Madison (who was in fact absent because of illness). That text is not extant.¹ But in 1772, a conflation of Brackenridge’s poem with Freneau’s, which was cast in the form of a three-way dialogue, was issued as a pamphlet, preserving the dialogue device—perhaps, Smeall suggests, “because the two poets had distinct, almost contradictory images of American Indians, of the good life in America, and of America’s destiny.” This poem is a hodgepodge, a patchwork. As Smeall notes, neither poet’s portion shows awareness of arguments of the other. Brackenridge says, “See the America of the past, incult, dreary, listless, Amerind; see the work that discovered and planted it; see the present glory of it and ask: how has this come about, if not through Agriculture, Commerce, and men like Whitefield? So now look to America’s future...