Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
Davies' sermon, and the rhetorical similarities might be almost as much
like Maury's as Davies', though the Huguenot cleric is not here proposed
as the author.198 But one may judge for himself, after reading Lemay's
essay ascribing authorship.
As to the stylistic value of these essays, critics differ widely. Some think
the best-known, No. X, both shallow and badly organized, with a superficial
display of learning. Almost all the pieces include poetic quotation,
a great deal of historical and classical allusion, and an insistence that the
present struggle with the French must be considered as a vital conflict in
which the fate of the British empire and the Protestant religion will be
determined. Beginning with the first essay, there is a rousing call to colonials
to realize their danger and to form a militia army to fight the Gallic
papists beyond the mountains. Some essays are highly critical of the
conduct of affairs by some of the present officers of the provincial forces
and even perhaps by Governor Dinwiddie. Ford saw the sensitive George
Washington as personally so offended by No. X and perhaps others that
he considered resigning his commission, and Douglas Freeman in his
George Washington outlines in some detail the effect of these essays,
especially of No. X, on the colonel and his subordinates. Some officers
wrote a furious letter insisting that the governor himself must have
known of and might have consented to this one if not all of the essays.
There are several intriguing features of the "Centinel" group. The
author suggests cultivating the southern Indians for the British side, the
Cherokees especially. The author or authors knew a great deal about
recent French and British history and was possibly more concerned with
combatting Popery than with saving lives along the frontier. Yet in general
the essays were such eloquent exhortations to concerted action that
editors in other colonies (especially to the north ) felt they were as pertinent
to their situations as to Virginia's. Many items were copied by one
gazette from another, but with the possible exception of legislative and
gubernatorial addresses, the "Centinel" seems to have been read by more
colonial Americans before 1764 than any other prose periodical material
originally published in British North America. The various essays occupied
most of the front page of all these gazettes, from New Hampshire
to Boston to Connecticut to New York to Philadelphia to Annapolis,
though one Maryland Gazette containing two essays placed the second unnumbered
one on an inside page, from necessity. They were certainly
among the most rhetorically effective of the prose polemics in the years
before the Parsons' Cause and Stamp Act controversies.199
In the South-Carolina Gazette the best-known early essay series was
the "Meddler's Club" pieces of 1735. Humorous and mildly satiric, they
owe much to the T atler-Spectator tradition. They were meant to be
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