Philip Freneau's Summa of American Exceptionalism: “The Rising Glory of America” without Brackenridge

Abstract

��� Philip Freneau’s “The Rising Glory of America” is an exciting poem, arguably the most important American poem of its age. Its composition is entangled in the historical events that created American independence, and it was written by a poet who (later) probably had more direct influence on the country’s politics than any other poet in America’s history. The poem articulates many of the formative myths in the cultural imagination that brought the American nation into being: the translatio studii and translatio imperii ideas that resurfaced in the nineteenth century as “manifest destiny”; the conflicting Anglophilia and Anglophobia of England’s rebellious offspring; the conflicting Whiggish trust in progress versus a romantic noble savagism; the so-called leyenda negra of depraved Spanish colonization; and the complementary (and later conflicting) visions of a Hamiltonian future built on commerce, or a Jeffersonian future built on agriculture. The poem culminates in a vision of America as site of the biblical New Jerusalem, descending from the heavens and settling somewhere, roughly, in the vicinity of New Jersey—a vision presented with all its implications of Americans as an exceptional “chosen people,” a light to all nations, under the approving eye of God’s Providence. Yet the author is uncertain about biblical authority, and the poem reveals him in the act of hesitating between biblical literalism and deistic rationalism, as it does in the act of shifting allegiance from a providential to a political future, without making too fine a distinction between them. As such, it is a demonstration piece for Sacvan Bercovich’s familiar thesis about the transformation of biblical myth into political rhetoric. The poem, I would argue, is artfully presented not merely to articulate these primary nationalist mythologies but also to hold them in suspension. My impulse to write about Freneau arises from the neglect and apparent misunderstanding of a poem that holds such a focal position in the

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