American Sinner/Canadian Saint? The Further Adventures of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs, 1799-1840

Abstract

Query-Would not a book with the following tide be as popular as the moral memoirs of Burroughs? A History of the Devil, written by himself, and published at the request of his hearers.Long Island Herald, Dec. 17, 1798.1His room was hung round with copies, or originals of the master-pieces of some of the distinguished painters of Christian life and suffering, and every thing about him indicated very convincingly the genuineness of his repentance and reformation.The Hon. Isaac F. Redfield, Chief Justice, Vermont, 1838.2During the early 1980s, the elderly Thornton Cleveland recounted several stories concerning the mythical Homer Boroughs that he had heard as a youth in the border township of Barnston, Quebec. One tale concerned how, as a young man attending divinity college, Boroughs and a friend removed many of the street signs which were made of wood in those days as a caper. When the authorities went to the door of Boroughs's room, could hear that he was deep in prayer, and there was a rule that one was to be disturbed while they were medicating [sic] in prayer. While his friend was in the furnace room burning the signs as quickly as possible, Boroughs was praying Oh thou wicked and adulteress generation who are seeking for signs but there will be no signs given unto them and so on, until time enough had passed for the evidence to have been destroyed. In another story, Boroughs-whose pose as a clergyman had been uncovered-was chased from town by members of the congregation demanding recompense for the two weeks of sermons he still owed. Boroughs took refuge high up in an old barn and, armed with a pitchfork, he repaid the congregation with a sermon on the topic of where I am ye cannot come.3These stories, which clearly refer to the American expatriate Stephen Burroughs, reveal that he remained part of the Quebec-Vermont borderland mythology-making the mistaken first name, Homer, somehow appropriate-two centuries after the publication of his widely read memoirs as a rebellious young man from Massachusetts. They are also a good illustration of how the Burroughs myth took on a life of its own, for only the second tale appears in The Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs. Local histories published in the mid-nineteenth century add stories about Burroughs's adventures north of the American border, including his dismissal as Stanstead's preacher after he joined the young men and boys of his congregation on a Sunday fishing expedition, his escape from arrest as a counterfeiter by wearing his snowshoes back to front, and his role as a physician during the smallpox epidemic of 1802.4These Canadian narratives resonate closely with Burroughs's self-described American exploits as a defiant juvenile, college-age prankster, fake preacher, ship's surgeon, schoolmaster, alchemist, counterfeiter, serial adulterer, increasingly daring jail breaker, southern land agent involved in Georgia's Yahoo frauds, and western surveyor associated with Robert Morris, who was the wealthiest man in the United States until his bankruptcy, which also ruined Burroughs financially. Literary scholars and historians of the early Republican era are still discussing the revolutionary implications of The Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, first published in 1798. They also debate the motivations of the enigmatic Dartmouth-educated author who presented himself as a maligned hero while modeling his narrative on the criminal literature and rogues' tales of the eighteenth century, as well as the popular Spanish picaresque tales.5Most recent studies refer to Burroughs as a trickster who flouted oppressive authority to reveal the hypocrisy of postrevolutionary society and extend the range of individual sovereignty. Others point out that he was a self-serving confidence man who took advantage of his privileged connections whenever his dishonest schemes failed. These judgments, which are not mutually exclusive, are based almost entirely on Burroughs's own quasifictional account, which ended in 1797 when he was thirty-two years old and had more than half his life yet to live. …