Let Those Flatter Who Fear: American Independence in Verse
Preface and Table of Contents
Like superheroes, nations need origin stories. In the one the Romans told, Aeneas fled the destruction of Troy, and founded the city that became their Empire. In England’s story, Aeneas’s great-grandson Brutus named and populated the island of Great Britain, and became its first king. Both stories are bunk, but for the purposes they served, the truth was no obstacle.
America is different. Young enough to remember its origin, and born late enough for hard records to exist, the real reason is that a false story, even one derived from the great Trojan War, would pale beside the true deeds of the real heroes and villains.
The story has been told many times, but one of the best tellings is still the first, as found in the speeches and the pamphlets, and the declarations, letters, and petitions, of the people who opposed independence and the people who made it happen. This telling is less about boots on the ground than ideas in the air: ideas about government authority, freedom and human nature, and British subjects becoming American citizens. If it’s more abstract than Hamilton charging British trenches at Yorktown, it’s just as thrilling: ideas and ideals jousting on a battlefield of their own.
The great moments of this story are scattered across volumes, buried in libraries, and hidden in long and frankly boring paragraphs and pages. They need to be distilled and they need to be stitched together. These poems isolate those poetic moments, and elevate and polish them into poetic form. Of course a great deal of poetic license has been taken. I do not judge whether the radical, moderate, and loyalist ideas here displayed were justified, or persuasive, or even consistent. My motive and conviction is that, either way, they were exhilarating.
Table of Contents (to be updated as poems are published):
Prologue: Join, or Die (Benjamin Franklin, 1754)
Part 1: Taxation Without Representation
The Administration of the Colonies (Thomas Pownall, 1764)
The Stamp Act (Parliament, 1765)
Resolves Against the Stamp Act (Patrick Henry, 1765)
To the Board of Trade in London (Francis Bernard, 1765)
The Martin Howard Saga (1765)
Declarations and Petitions of the Continental Congress (1765)
“I’m charged with giving birth to sedition in America” (1766)
Part 2: Occupation, Massacre, War and Independence
An Oration Commemorating the Boston Massacre (Joseph Warren, 1772)
See also, The Girls Who Went Away: Poems; and Poetica Philosophica.