The Laughing Doves of 1812 and the Satiric Endowment of Antiwar Rhetoric in the United States

Abstract

Antiwar activists in the United States have often made recourse to satire in order to rebut claims that their dissent is sententious and effeminate. Federalist opponents of the War of 1812 used the genre to posit, moreover, that they alone could manage the military and economic crisis that resulted from a disastrous second war against Great Britain. But satire, in an era of incipient nationalism, was problematically associated with British snobbery. I argue that wartime periodicals show Federalist satire pulling in diverging directions. Projects like Alexander Hanson's Federal Republican are regressive, reviving the Augustan archetype of the satirist as intellectual martyr, even as they unwittingly lay the groundwork for a liberal model of civil disobedience. Projects like George and Henry Helmbold's Tickler are progressive, phrasing Federalist principles in the post-Federalist vocabulary of liberal competition through their experiments with populist dialect, which also anticipate the postwar transformation of British American “satire” into all-American “humor.”