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29 ' 7jgchÉhEdZign8dbZhid6bZg^XV Robert Burns wrote from the heart of an eighteenth-century Scottish culture poised to send its citizens to the four corners of the globe. Many, of course, landed in the new American nation. By the 1780s, New York City and Philadelphia already contained active Scottish émigré communities that kept abreast of the Scottish literary scene. American booksellers advertised Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect within weeks of the publication of the 1787 Edinburgh edition. Although the Philadelphia newspaper Pennsylvania Packet printed a few verses, émigrés Peter Stewart and George Hyde of that city published the first American edition of Burns in 1788, emphasizing the comic brilliance of “the Celebrated Ayrshire Ploughman.” Glasgow-born Archibald McLean brought out a New York edition that same year, heralding Burns’s poem in praise of the American Revolution. In 1788, the Constitution was one year old, and the capitol of the United States still located in New York City (it later moved to Philadelphia for a decade and eventually to the District of Columbia in 1800). As a copy of the New York edition of Burns’s poems was discovered in George Washington’s library upon his death, it is likely that the president—who surely knew of Burns’s support for the patriot cause—acquired it shortly after publication. Three American editions of Burns’s verses appeared before 1800. Thomas Jefferson’s Aberdeen-born tutor at William and Mary even suggested that because Americans would surely develop a dialect of their own, Burns might serve as a “model.” When American Universal Magazine, published in Philadelphia, noted the poet’s death in 1797, the publication became the first of thousands of American tributes to Scotland’s national bard.1 The Scottish community in Philadelphia proved especially responsive. As there was no international copyright, Philadelphia printers republished Dr. John C. Currie’s four-volume study (1800) and R. H. Cromek’s Reliques of Robert Burns (1808) within a year of their appearance in Britain. The burns’s poetry comes to america 30 finding of a previously undiscovered Burns verse or the setting of one of his songs to music usually merited comment by American newspapers. Eighteen years after the actual event, the Salem (Massachusetts) Gazette reprinted the 1796 account of his death. In 1823, a blind Scottish émigré made his living by traveling through New England soliciting subscriptions for a new six-hundred-page edition of Burns’s works. While visiting Baltimore in 1834, Charles Augustus Murray was delighted to discover a museum with statues to Burns’s most famous characters, Tam O’ Shanter and Souter Johnny.2 In 1811, Robert Walsh, editor of the American Review of History and Politics, argued that the poetry of Burns was more widely read and understood in the States than in England. Americans were not “a mere tilling and shopkeeping race,” he said (somewhat defensively). Instead, they greatly admired the scientific and literary achievements of Scotland and acknowledged Edinburgh as “the metropolis of genius and learning.”3 By 1860, American publishers had brought out at least twenty-four editions of Burns’s verses. In 1848, Samuel Tyler, a Scottish-born Baltimore lawyer, added a biography of his own: Robert Burns: As a Poet and as a Man (New York, 1848), the first full-length American tribute, which carefully avoided mentioning his sexual activities. In addition, all through the early decades of the new century, newspapers drew on Burns’s poems as fillers to round out their columns. On his deathbed, Burns said to his wife, Jean, that his name would be far more appreciated after he was gone than during his lifetime. He proved prescient. When the poet died in Dumfries in 1796, a crowd of several hundred admirers marched in the funeral cortege. The London Herald’s obituary described him as possessing “the vigour and versatility of a mind guided only by the light of Nature and the inspiration of genius.”4 Around 1801, a Greenock group decided to commemorate Burns’s birthday with a ceremonial dinner. Similar gatherings in Paisley, Dumfries, Irvine, Kilmarnock, and Dunfermline soon followed. By 1815, Edinburgh had formed a Burns club as well. In addition to celebrating his birthday, Burns admirers began to erect a variety of civic memorials throughout Scotland. Greenock officials dedicated a monument to Highland Mary in 1842, but the most dramatic celebration occurred two years later. August 6, 1844, was declared a Scottish national holiday...

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