Poetry and American Revolutionary Identity: The Case of Phillis Wheatley and John Paul Jones

Poetry and American Revolutionary Identity: The Case of Phillis Wheatley and John Paul Jones DANIEL J. ENNIS The impetus for this article is a letter the American Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones wrote to his friend and fellow naval officer, Captain Hector McNeill, on October 31, 1777. Jones was on that day preparing to sail from Boston aboard his soon-to-be famous vessel, the Ranger. His letter to McNeill reads as follows: I am on the point of sailing, I have wrote to you, pray be so good as [to] put the Inclosed into the hands of the Celebrated Phillis, the African Favorite of the Nine and of Appollo—should She Reply, I hope you will be the bearer.1 "The Inclosed" to which Jones refers is a poem. As far as eighteenth-century poems go, it is a fairly pedestrian piece. The stanzas are written upon an unidentified black profile, and the speaker praises the subject of the silhouette in the established mode of the gentleman-devotee, as in this stanza, which declares that the woman's beauty is worthy of a full-color portrait: Pity so excellent a face, Should in a shade preserve thy name, Such beauty, harmony and grace, The painter's softest tints may claim!2 85 86 / ENNIS Jones continues in this vein for some nine further metrically indifferent stanzas, the penultimate being, The loveliest form, the fairest face, The brightest eye, the gentlest mind, And every virtue, charm and grace, Should be to endless fame consigned. As tempting as I find the mission, it is beyond me to rescue the literary reputation of John Paul Jones. Americans are fortunate that Jones kept his day job. Jones' day job, of course, was to be the most dashing and quotable American Revolutionary war hero—the man who shouted "I have not yet begun to fight," and who gave the United States Navy an enduring slogan when he declared "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm's way."3 However, in October 1777, when Jones sent his poem to Wheatley, he was still one of many officers in the infant Continental Navy, and while he had just returned from a successful raid against British shipping off Newfoundland, he was perhaps a minor hero-not quite famous. The John Paul Jones of 1777, in fact, shows signs of being insecure about not only his reputation, but also about his very identity, and his sending of a poem to Wheatley illuminates the role of poetic discourse in the formation of eighteenth-century American identity. For Jones, writing poetry was part of a larger project of gentrification that preoccupied the sailor his entire life. He was born in Scotland, the son of a gardener, and was christened simply John Paul. Lacking prospects ashore, he was sent off to sea at age thirteen. By age twenty-one he was a successful merchant captain, was half-owner of his ship, and had amassed a small fortune in the West Indian trade. Yet a mysterious murder charge in 1773 caused John Paul to flee the Carribean, apparently one step ahead of the law. The evidence against John Paul was such that he abandoned his ship, property and accounts. Upon arriving in North Carolina sometime in the intervening months, he changed his name first to Paul Jones, then later to the now-familiar John Paul Jones.4 The murder charges are best treated elsewhere; what interests me is the newly created John Paul Jones that surfaces in the colonies on the eve of the Revolution. The name change is the most obvious evidence that the sailor was trying to fashion an identity, but there are other suggestions that the fugitive Scottish sea-captain was actively creating a new image, and he was doing so just as more and more colonists were beginning to question their Poetry and American Revolutionary Identity / 87 own national identities. For Jones (like many Defoe heroes), America was, ironically perhaps given our nation's putatively democratic origins, a place to become a gentleman. Samuel Eliot Morison describes the beginning of Jones' gentrification: [Jones...