Wit and Politics in Revolutionary British America: The Case of Samuel Seabury and Alexander Hamilton

This essay reads the famous exchange of anonymously written pamphlets between the American loyalist Samuel Seabury and the patriot Alexander Hamilton as an episode in transatlantic literary history. Reading the political pamphlet as a genre in which literary and cultural debates over taste and style simultaneously were taking place, this essay argues that for both patriot and loyalist writers, demonstrating British cultural literacy was crucial to establishing political authorship in America. The subsequent debates between Seabury and Hamilton over such subjects as wit and classical expression testify to the ongoing importance of this literacy as well as the larger dissonance between the political and cultural dimensions of the American Revolution.