Though Justice frown, and Discord smile,

I will be heard above a mile,

To laud the man, who cannot fail

To go to congress-or to jail!

A second poem, "Political Squib," written after Lyon's defeat, is interesting chiefly because it is in the form of an ironical petition, the followers of Lyon apparently petitioning Congress to allow him to sit, giving as their reasons the political slander already used and his buying of votes. This is the same device which Fessenden used on a larger scale in Terrible Tractoration a few years later.

The two longest of these political poems are "Simon Spunkey's Political Pepper-Pot" in the Museum of January 2, 1798, and "Political Summary for the Year 1800" quoted in the Museum January 27, 1800, as "From the Vergennes Gazette." These are merely New Year's odes after the contemporary tradition of newspapers before cartoons could more easily give the gist of the past year's happenings:

A kind of Hudibrastic summary,
Of politics, and other flummery,
Of matters tragical and queer,
Which mark the annals of last year,
And with a congée, low and pleasant,
Wish people happy through the present.

The poems show Fessenden well established as an anti-jacobin poet, at the same time that Canning and Frere and Ellis were satirizing French and other brands of republicanism in the London Anti-Jacobin, turning out satire of much the same variety, and in the first of these poems, with as much success. Fessenden's note to the poem in the collected volume says "It was reprinted in pamphlets, and had an extensive circulation throughout the United States."

He first surveys the state of France, under the Directory, and

..their Corsican commander The modern would-be Alexander;

her military successes abroad, and her woeful state at home. He tells of French depredations on American commerce, and of the

defense of our shipping by England, with an account of a naval battle in which the British defeated the Dutch and in which

Full many a Dutchman took a notion

To try a voyage beneath the ocean,
Where Captain Death his flag unfurl'd,
And anchor'd him in t'other world!

He mentions England's troubles at home, the mutiny in the navy, the administration of Pitt, and

Fox, so eloquent at railing.

Returning to America, he surveys his own country, and has to admit, that altho there is an epidemic of yellow fever, and the land is cursed with jacobins,

Still not one nation out of seven

Is favor'd half so much by heaven.

He makes the same charge against the republican press that, copied from William Cobbett's journal, was prevalent in England, namely, that its proprietors were in the pay of the French :

Though Franklin Bache 12 I'll bet a bowl,

Once own'd a puny factious soul;

Yet, lack-a-day, who would have thought it!
Alas! Alas! the French have bought it!

Matthew Lyon and other democrats, later to be further satirized in Democracy Unveiled, are here given a small sample of what is in store for them. The defeat of Jefferson for the presidency gives Fessenden an excuse for reviewing the Virginian's character, and for attributing his campaign to French interest. He further attributes a great deal of the political difficulty of the country to immigrants, especially to the Irish (typified by Lyon and Duane), famed then as now for political activity.18

"Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, founder and proprietor of the Aurora, the chief anti-federalist paper.

This was a common Federalist point of view. John Adams says (quoted in Cambridge History of American Literature, II:181): If we had been blessed with common sense, we should not have been overthrown by Philip Freneau, Duane, Callender, Cooper, and Lyon, or their great patron and protector. A group of foreign liars encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the prosperity of the country.

The description of the mishap at the launching of the "Constitution" is typical of this type of verse:

My muse is under contribution,
To sing the frigate Constitution:
Lest this our pithy ode be lost on
Commercial wits, and tars of Boston.

Bostonians built a stately frigate,
And undertook to man and rig it,
Which set Sedition's sons a scowling,
And madden'd jacobins to howling.

This 'foresaid frigate, on a day
Appointed, was to glide away
To hoary Ocean's oozy bed

With Neptune, then and there to wed.

The day arriv'd at length, when lo!
Miss Constitution would not go:
Now jacobinick sinners scoff,
Because she fails to travel off!

They swore she was prophetick wench,
And foresaw trouble from the French,
If she to federal folly kept tune,
And sought the arms of master Neptune.

At length, in merry mood, she went in,
And floats her natural element in:

O may she ever triumph there,

The "Wat'ry God's" peculiar care!

After a compliment to the Farmer's Weekly Museum, its publisher, and the contributors, and a farewell fling at Della Crusca, he concludes with the promise to repeat his performance next

year.

Illness prevented the satirist from carrying out this promise, but the 1800 ode appeared in due time. It falls behind that of 1798 in quality of verse and in spirit. The yellow fever and the jacobins are still with us; but in the poem the American jacobins are represented only by Tony Haswell, a printer of Bennington, Vermont, and Tom McKean, opposition governor of

"Note, Original Poems (1806), 65.

Pennsylvania, with a passing glance at Matthew Lyon and the factious Irish in general. It is only natural that a Federal satirist would in the year 1800 find poor material for his muse in his party, swiftly and surely bringing on its ruin by internal dissension and over-zealous measures of repression. The Museum incorporated with the "Ode" Fessenden's "Elegy on the Death of General Washington," which, with a hymn composed for and sung at the Anniversary Election of the State of Vermont in 1800,15 are two of his more serious poems with political background.

Almost the only one of these serious poems to attain success is the tranference of the anti-jacobin sentiment of the satires1 to "The Rutland Ode," written for the Fourth of July celebration in Rutland at which Fessenden pronounced the oration. The Rutland Herald, July 9, 1798, introduces it: "The following ode, composed and set to music for the occasion by Mr. Fessenden, was inimitably performed by a numerous and brilliant choir of singers, under the tuition of Mr. Thos. H. Atwell." The music shown in the accompanying reproduction of the first stanza was undoubtedly by Fessenden, as the Herald states, and does not seem too difficult to have been written by a man who had taught a country singing school and who continued an interest in music. thruout his life.

18

The poem is a patriotic song, written in an irregular of considerable vigor, which may be shown by the fourth stanza :

stanza,

15Farmer's Weekly Museum, October 27, 1800; Original Poems, 8.

1646

"At that time an armament, which afterwards sailed to Egypt under Buonaparte, lay at Toulon: its destination was not known in America, but many supposed that it was intended to waft the blessings of French liberty to the United States." Note to the "Ode," Original Poems, 1.

"The text of the complete poem, including the third "sans culotte" stanza added in the London edition, is given in Appendix B.

A more famous poem, Robert Treat Paine's "Adams and Liberty," written for the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society (for whom Fessenden wrote an ode eight years later) in December of 1798 bears a striking resemblance to the "Rutland Ode." The verse is the same except that Paine's stanza omits lines eight to ten of Fessenden's form; the refrain, And ne'er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves,

While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves. resembles Fessenden's; and the progress of the thought thru the nine stanzas is an elaboration of the theme of this ode, with many lines accurately paralleling, even to the rhyme words. See Duyckinck, I:660.