Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New EnglandEmpowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early AmericaWriting the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America

Abstract

While all three of these books participate in the ongoing “transatlantic turn in early American literary studies in general” (Gould, 7), Meredith Neuman’s does an especially helpful job of reminding readers how closely intertwined the expressions “early American” and “early modern” are. While she places New England ministers’ sermons in the context of discursive practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Karen Weyler and Philip Gould address later developments: Gould discusses the relationship between Britain and its North Atlantic colonies during the decades leading up to and including those colonists’ Revolution, and Weyler focuses more narrowly on North America vis-à-vis “the participation of working people in print culture from 1760 to 1815” (2).Neuman’s readers will appreciate the way her title ties us, as early twenty-first-century readers, to members of the seventeenth-century New England ministers’ congregations. Her book immerses us in what she identifies as “sermon culture,” which consists of the several interlocking ways in which a great many early Americans participated in making sense of sermons. She describes sermon culture as thoroughly interactive, encompassing “an entire set of practices that produce not only texts (sermons proper as well as nonsermonic writing, especially history, biography, and anecdote) but also material artifacts (printed sermons, notes, copies, and transcriptions)” (7). She backs up her statement that such “reconceptualizing of the production of sermon literature as a discursive process confirms existing book history scholarship” (29–30) with a richly detailed endnote that begins, “In a field where the ‘sociology of texts’ has come to complement (if not eclipse) conventional bibliographical analysis,” and then zeroes in on “the ‘communications circuit’ suggested by Robert Darnton, illustrating the production of books not as a linear process but as a cycle” (211n69). The notes that a wide range of New Englanders took while, and frequently after, a minister was delivering a sermon make up an integral part of the archive on which Neuman draws. Her coinage of “enabled debility” is at the heart of Jeremiah’s Scribes. Having cited in her introduction Charles Lloyd Cohen’s “privileg[ing] what he calls ‘original debility’—the broad implications of the premise of original sin, innate depravity, and postlapsarian limits to human understanding” (12), and having established sermon culture as an inherently intertextual space, Neuman writes that such “deep intertextuality can create traction for the fallen human intellect to become enabled by its own debility—to participate in, recognize, and partially articulate the workings of grace” (171). In constructing this book-length account of sermon culture, then, with its emphasis on “linguistic acts of enabled debility” (172), Neuman is shedding fresh light on the New England Way.An example of Neuman’s attention to “the interplay of visual and textual fields” (viii) is her discussion of an element that Weyler also analyzes in Empowering Words: the “mourning rule,” the frequently heavy border enveloping funeral announcements. Neuman and Weyler both go further: Jeremiah’s Scribes contains an analysis of palimpsests in their literal, material form, as well as discussions of them metaphorically (166) and even by implication (178), and Empowering Words includes a detailed analysis of Deborah Sampson’s clothing as well as the emphasis on her dress in George Graham’s engraving of the painting by Joseph Stone (154–55). Building on Michael Warner’s observations about the relationship between social standing and print culture, Weyler notes, “Standing outside elite or even middling circles, these outsider individuals . . . grasped the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion” (2). She presents a series of chapters focusing on Phillis Wheatley; Briton Hammon and John Marrant; Samson Occom; Deborah Sampson; the newspaper editor Clementina Rind; and John Howland, the barber turned community leader whose reference to “the republic of letters” continues to resonate throughout our consideration of writing in early America. In placing Howland at the center of her closing chapter, alongside other figures who had similarly “emerged from humble, even impoverished beginnings” (213), Weyler shifts this book’s focus away from the expression “outsider individuals.” She concentrates the rethinking of “collaboration and sponsorship” that she promises in her introduction (2) in the chapter on Sampson and in the following one on Rind. Of Sampson, Weyler states, “Certainly, she stretches the boundaries of what we consider collaborative authorship. . . . Sampson exercised her agency not in writing but in persuading more powerful men to write about her—a process that enabled her celebrity and compels us to reconsider the nature of collaboration” (147). She pushes the point further in discussing William Rind’s widow, who succeeded him as editor of the Virginia Gazette: “We need to consider the multitudinous tasks of editing a colonial newspaper as a form of writing. Rind’s body of journalistic work enables us to embrace a more capacious understanding of authorship in early America, for newspaper editing was a form of authorship that was collaborative [and] intertextual” (167). Weyler’s suggestions about the elasticity of the Foucauldian author function, and her contextualizing of the responsibilities of the editor, complement Gould’s comment about the Loyalist Robert Bell, who took the liberty of tinkering with the anonymous pamphlet Common Sense (1776): “Bell’s formulation serves as a historical alternative to Foucault’s for literary creativity and proprietorship: we could call it, I suppose, the ‘printer function’” (141).Gould’s title reveals his book’s emphasis on rebellion: “The deliberate substitution of rebellion for revolution in my title signals the recuperation of Loyalist perspectives and assumptions as part of this book’s recalibration of the importance of the political discourse opposing the formation of the U.S. nation” (26). He concentrates on “the complex relations between aesthetics and politics” (24), an emphasis that involves recurring stereotypes: against the backdrop of “the stereotype of Loyalist gentility” (105), Loyalists routinely critiqued the Patriots’ “provincial illiteracy” (45). Those critiques frequently zeroed in on examples of satire and of burlesque, ridiculing writings that displayed the Patriots’ bombast or, as Gould describes it, “linguistic emptiness” (59). In describing “what I am calling ‘imperial regionalism’” (146), Gould distinguishes late eighteenth-century New England from the earlier New England that Neuman describes as the birthplace of “sermon culture.” His closing chapter, “New English Rebellion,” demonstrates that the Loyalists’ writings were a way of “redefining themselves vis-à-vis the descendants of Puritans who never were civilized and loyal British subjects at all” (146). Gould traces the Loyalists’ demonizing of “this radical pamphlet by regionalizing it—by making it part of an established narrative about Anglo-American Puritan radicalism. Loyalist political writing recast Common Sense as a New English work and its author [as] the last of the Puritans” (161).In resisting easy binaries, Gould emphasizes that his own argument “complicates the domestic/exile binary in Loyalist studies that tends to emphasize their alienation only after migrating abroad” (179n23). The “crisis of affiliation” that characterizes Loyalists’ writings is “less about the problem of simultaneously being British and American and more about the problem of being neither and alone” (23). Such profound dividedness reflects a term the Loyalist Joseph Galloway used in 1775, in addressing colonists’ ongoing restlessness: “‘Do you design to give up your present enjoyment of all the blessings of life,’ he asked, ‘for the horrors and distress of a civil war’?” (38, my emphasis). In parsing the basic Loyalist/Patriot binary, Gould lumps Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782), into the former category. He argues, with Edward Larkin, that Crèvecoeur and other Loyalists advocated a “vision of a cosmopolitan American identity” as a corrective to the “stringent and exclusionary patriotism” that they attributed to the Sons of Liberty (Larkin quoted in Gould, 156). While recent scholarship by Christopher Iannini and others has emphasized the cosmopolitan focus of Crèvecoeur’s writings, the jury is still out on whether the construction “Loyalists like Crèvecoeur” is an oversimplification. Crèvecoeur is, after all, one figure who clearly embodied that domestic/exile split in his own lived experience as well as in his writings, both in English and in his native French.