Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Satire on the Times," printed in the January 8 issue of this Gazette, continues
both praise and censure, extending the names mentioned directly to
George Wythe, William Byrd III, John Wayles, and several others. The
satire is timely, topical, and in the tradition of earlier political and polemical
verse in the colony. Bolling published his work in both the later Gazettes,
though the Rind issues containing them are no longer extant. They appeared
soon after the momentous refusal of the Grand Jury in October
1766 to "punish the Licentiousness of the Press" by declining to indict
Bolling for his piece of the bailment of the homicidal Colonel John Chiswell.
Perhaps if such a discussion had come ten years earlier, the "Dinwiddianae"
poems and prose might have appeared in the provincial press.
Landon Carter's skill in versification has not been assessed by the
editor of his journal, but there is much evidence both printed and manuscript
that he wrote satiric poems as well as prose and was directly attacked
in the same medium, in some instances as early as the 1750s. Among
the Carter Papers at the University of Virginia are at least two sets of
couplet verses attacking his political opponents, in part probably intended
for manuscript circulation in campaigns of the 1760s. The "Answer" half
of one he forwarded to his friend Colonel Tayloe is in rather good pentameter
couplets. Others almost certainly appeared in the Virginia Gazette
against the Bolling-Hewitt-Burke group just mentioned in the midst of
their vitriolic attacks on the aristocratic master of Sabine Hall. 88
Probably scores of these political satiric poems were circulated in manuscript
or printed in pamphlet or newspaper as the uproars and problems
of the two decades from 1755 multiplied. 8 9 Thus satire continued to
flourish in Virginia on to the Revolution, though the later more distinguished
examples are purely prose. The pre-Revolutionary polemical essays
on the Pistole Fee and the Two-Penny Act controversies beginning in
1753 and continuing at least to 1773 involve the ablest writers of the latter
decades of the colony, including William Stith, Landon Carter, and Richard
Bland on one side and the Reverend John Camm and his supporters on
the other. There are able political and social essays other than theirs in the
Virginia Gazette, but perhaps no more effectively reasoned, beautifully
phrased, and devastatingly ironic polemical prose was written in the
America of the period than the satires of Bland and Carter, and very close
to them in quality is the writing of their antagonist Camm. As noted in
Chapter VI, the Two-Penny Act writing especially was an eminently appropriate
climax for Virginia colonial religious or ecclesiastical satirical
literature, for it fuses what had long existed in juxtaposition, the interests
of church as institution and people as state.
It is from the Two-Penny-Act-Parson's Cause conflict that Patrick
Henry proceeded to immortality. And it was an act for religious freedom
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