Philip Morin Freneau
school in Flatbush (currently Brooklyn) and then with his friend Brackenridge in Somerset County, Maryland. He did not seem well suited to the profession, however, as he complained in a letter to James Madison of the “30 students . . . who prey upon me like leeches” (Marsh 28). He also wrote to share the news of his fi rst publication, a small collection of poetry entitled “The American Village,” which appeared in print in New York (Marsh 28–29). Perhaps because he was attempting to fulfi ll his father’s dying wish, perhaps because a career in teaching seemed too unappealing, Freneau returned to Princeton for two years (1773 and 1774) to pursue a career as a Presbyterian minister (Marsh 32). His natural proclivity for Newtonian science, however, became too difficult to overcome, and Freneau rejected Presbyterianism to embrace deism. The biographer Philip Marsh attributes Freneau’s deism to his admiration for the writings of Addison in the Spectator (33). In February 1776, Freneau accepted the invitation of John Wilkinson Hanson, owner of Prospect Hill plantation, to set sail with him for Santa Cruz (present-day St. Croix). He wrote later to his friend Alexander Anderson of “being averse to enter the Army and be knocked in the head” (50). Marsh argues that the island’s remoteness from scenes of the Revolutionary War did not mean that Freneau was ignorant of battles or of the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the island’s economic interest in trade alone would have guaranteed that Santa Cruz would receive news (53). On the basis of Freneau’s application for a federal pension, we know that he spent time two years as a privateer (54). It is certain that he sailed to Bermuda and stayed for five weeks (56). On June 5, 1778, Freneau left Santa Cruz and returned to the newly created United States of America (57). On July 15, a mere six days after his arrival at Monmouth, Freneau enlisted in the army as a private and served as a master aboard the Indian Delaware in October 1778. While on board this ship bound for St. Eustatius, Freneau penned “American Independence,” which made fun of the British for their folly (Marsh 61–62). With the publication of this and “Ris-
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ing Glory,” Freneau “returned to his fi rst love— love of America, its future, and its perfectability” (63). He remained on the army’s rolls until May 1, 1780, meaning that he served for two years. When the 20-gun privateer that Freneau was sailing on, the Aurora, was hulled, Freneau was arrested and taken aboard a prison ship called the Scorpion (69). His time aboard the Scorpion was only three weeks as the conditions proved unhealthy and an ill Freneau was transferred to the Hunter, a hospital ship, on June 22 and exchanged on July 13. Freneau’s hatred for the British now was unmasked and personal. He drew on his own experience as a prisoner of war for his “The British Prison Ship,” which was published in 1780. At this time, he began writing his play, The Spy, and satirical pieces for the NewJersey Gazette (72). Freneau began working for Francis Bailey’s newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, in July 1781. “The next year was his most productive. Reporting news and commenting on it, in the next fourteen months he published forty poems and forty prose pieces. . . . He now did his best satires” (Marsh 77). He began a series of long essays named The Pilgrim, which ran for 19 numbers and took its inspiration from Addison and Steele’s works in The Spectator and the Tatler (81). He took on different personae and voices to address a variety of subjects: “Christopher Clodhopper” and “Priscilla Tripstreet” quibbled over ladies’ fashions; “Virginius” took on a British perspective to express hopes of reconquering the States (85). Whatever his pseudonym, Freneau seems to have written his last prose for the Journal in June 1784, when he sailed for the West Indies aboard the Dromelly. A hurricane hit the ship, and they landed in Jamaica (97). Francis Bailey published Freneau’s immigration propaganda, “Stanzas on the Emigration to America,” in 1785 in Bailey’s Almanac, and the following year a collection of over 100 of his poems appeared in print, also with Bailey as publisher (99–100). Freneau began writing more consistently on the issue of American Indians in the latter half of 1790, and all of the essays were published in the Daily Advertiser, a newspaper that employed him