American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

2. Elegy and the Subject of National Mourning

   Elegy and the Subject of National Mourning In the meantime were employed two pretty copious bleedings, a blister was applied to the part affected, two moderate doses of calomel were given, and an injection was administered, which operated on the lower intestines. [It was agreed] to try the result of another bleeding, when about  ounces of blood were drawn. . . . Vapours of vinegar and water were frequently inhaled . . . succeeded by repeated doses of emetic tartar . . . with no other effect than a copious discharge from the bowels. The power of life seemed now manifestly yielding to the force of the disorder. . . . Speaking, which was painful from the beginning, now became almost impracticable; respiration grew more and more contracted and imperfect, till half after eleven on Saturday night, retaining the full possession of his intellects—when he expired without a struggle. —    .  By , the young nation had already caught dramatic glimpses of itself in the mirror of mourning. From the start of the Revolutionary War to the end of the century, the deaths of soldiers, patriot noncombatants , illustrious citizens, and noncitizen subjects had inspired a wealth of elegies that reflected back to their audience various images of a country in tears. Such idealizing images encouraged members of what was in reality a riven and uncertain populace to understand themselves as ELEGY AND THE SUBJECT OF NATIONAL MOURNING  representatives of a nationally unified mourning subject. They exhorted a people to weep itself into being. In the process, the exaltation of the dead generated political anxieties at the heart of national life. On April , , during the first year of George Washington’s presidency, an estimated twenty thousand people joined Benjamin Franklin’s funeral procession and burial ceremony at Philadelphia’s Christ Church Burial Ground. The House of Representatives, acting the next day at the behest of James Madison, resolved to wear mourning badges for one month in Franklin’s honor. The Senate, however, refused to pass an equivalent resolution, and this refusal moved Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson to call upon George Washington for a counteractive gesture from the government’s executive branch. “I proposed to General Washington,” Jefferson later recalled , “that the executive department should wear mourning; he declined it, because he said he should not know where to draw the line, if he once began that ceremony.” The misgivings generated by Franklin’s death regarding national mourning for a private citizen—“an honor,” according to Benjamin Vaughan, “not shown to any person before out of office” —were greatly enhanced by the French response, beginning with Mirabeau’s galvanic address to the National Assembly, which “touched off,” as Julian Boyd reports, “a whole series of proceedings in the French capital that amounted to nothing less than a republican apotheosis of Franklin.” The pressure to respond to French enthusiasm only deepened American divisions over republican theory and practice, thus helping to set national mourning on a course of ambivalence well illustrated by Philip Freneau’s own sharply contrasting pair of Franklin elegies. The first, published in New York’s Daily Advertiser on April , is a fully pious declaration of collective sorrow at the loss of a quasi-deific political and intellectual leader—one who “seiz’d from Kings their sceptr’d pride, / And turn’d the lightning’s darts aside.” The second, however, published in the same newspaper almost a month later, ventriloquizes Franklin himself, speaking “from the other World” in utmost contempt for all the florid elegies that have been produced since his death. He attacks the pathetic fallacy and the sheer conventionality of its application in verses that, he finds, also misrepresent national mourning as  ELEGY AND THE SUBJECT OF NATIONAL MOURNING uniform (even if the skies had wept in Pennsylvania, “In Carolina, all was clear”) and forget the egalitarian current of the Revolution (“That day on which I left the coast, / A beggar man was also lost; / If nature wept, you must agree / She wept for him—as well as me”). Freneau’s satiric reaction against the shortcomings of national elegy opens with the spectral Franklin’s apparent rejection of the poetic enterprise altogether. “Love for your tribe I never had,” he says in the opening stanza, and in the third asserts that “To better trades I turn’d my views, / And never meddled with the Muse.” Yet the poem ends not with a denial of poetry’s place in national life but...