Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
in the preceding chapter, one "aside" is a mock play, and the portrait draw­
ings of members, of anniversary parades or celebrations, of mock-duels
and brawling, are in the eighteenth-century tradition of Hogarthian carica­
ture. To become a real part of American literature, the "History" must be
edited and published. When it is, there will be another major work in the
satiric tradition worthy to stand beside William Byrd's best.
The Tuesday Club was perhaps the ancestor of such later Maryland
groups as the Forensic Club and the Homony Club, the latter including
among its leading members Jonathan Boucher, the learned and articulate
Anglican loyalist parson. These and other social groups contemporary
with the Tuesday were like it devoted to wit, humor, and the burlesque,
and perhaps at least two of them have left surviving minutes written in
part in the satiric tradition, though apparently not of the literary quality
of the Tuesday "History" or even its "Record." Perhaps all the others were
in some sense political forums, but at least on the surface the Tuesday
Club's members discussed anything but the governmental problems of their
time. The club died with Hamilton in 1756, though by then others of its
leading spirits had moved away from Annapolis. It had combined burlesque
of forms sacred to British tradition, perhaps Scriblerian, with a supposedly
barbaric American outlook which was in reality derisive of Old World
attitudes and even literature. There was probably here too something of
Scottish and Irish resentment of English intellectual dominance, a resent­
ment perhaps expressed only semiconsciously. But from Sterling and the
Dulanys to the Gordons and Hamiltons, Scots and Irish points of view
simply had to be felt-as indeed they were in other sections of the South,
notably in South Carolina.
In some of his versions of the club history, Hamilton incorporated ver­
batim or "improved" songs, narrative verses, short anecdotes, puns and
conundrums and orations, all mocking, by other members, especially Jonas
Green. But Green, Hamilton, and their contemporaries within and with­
out the Tuesday Club were prolific writers and composed a great deal more
than is to be found in this most ambitious work of the period. Bacon, Ster­
ling, Cradock, Chase, the Dulanys, Dr. Adam Thomson, and several others
wrote for the Annapolis Gazette of Green and for Philadelphia journals, or
composed or compiled books published in the colony or in Britain. Though
many of these writings are non satiric and will be noted later, several do
belong here in this consideration of the southern humorous and satiric
tradition.
It was really when Jonas Green began publishing the second Maryland
Gazette that the final and golden age of Annapolis and Maryland co­
lonial intellectual life began. He had probably already asked Dr. Alexander
Hamilton to aid with literary materials for his periodical. Almost at once