The Hartford Wits: A Literature to Define the New Republic
by Jennifer DiCola Matos
The Hartford Wits were a group of white male authors centered in Hartford, Connecticut who wrote satirical and patriotic poetry during and following the American Revolution. They were particularly concerned that the democratic principles so strongly observed during the war should continue to guide the creation of the new nation. The Hartford Wits included as principal members: Joel Barlow (1754-1812), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), David Humphreys (1752-1818), and John Trumbull (1750-1831). Later members also included Richard Alsop (1761-1815), Theodore Dwight (1764-1846), and Lemuel Hopkins (1750-1801). Noah Webster (1758-1843) is considered a nominal member, due to his close friendship with Joel Barlow.
The members of the Hartford Wits first became acquainted at Yale College, as it was known at that time, in New Haven, Connecticut, where they were students (both undergraduate and graduate) and later tutors and teachers. There is no set time when all the members of the club were present. Rather, members came and went depending upon the circumstances of their own lives. The Yale years run from roughly 1767 until the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775. Later, after the war, many members of the group lived in Hartford, leading to its name.
Initially, as Yale students, the group was interested in a well-rounded liberal education for Connecticut youths that included philosophy. During the American Revolution, they were staunch Patriots dedicated to the principles of liberty and freedom. After the war, the Wits became focused on the conundrum of how to create a functioning American nation. They were Federalists, particularly concerned that an uneducated populist would corrupt society, and as time went on, were greatly opposed to Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, which they viewed as a dangerous offshoot of radical French revolutionary thought. Afraid of that godless and destabilizing influence, the Wits attempted to protect Connecticut’s traditional religious and political institutions through their writing.
Overall, the writings of the Hartford Wits attempt to answer the question, What will the American Republic be?, by suggesting again and again the customs, mores, and political structures of Connecticut. But over time it became clear that the country as a whole was moving far from the 18th-century Connecticut they so loved.
There are several reasons the Hartford Wits are so little remembered today. They wrote within a limited historic timeframe, and, as practical Connecticut Yankees, they pursued more profitable careers and opportunities, with writing as more of a hobby. If they had dedicated their lives solely to writing, their output would have been greater and perhaps more memorable. But it is also worth noting that the writings of the Hartford Wits would have appealed, even in their own time, to a very specific, highly educated person who would have been able to discern the style and references to contemporary satirical British literature and understand the context within which it was written. The Wits’ writing represents a specific period of history, one of American uncertainty, and their alarmed reaction to it. To the modern reader, to whom the context is lost, the style antiquated, and the references unfamiliar, the work of the Hartford Wits comes across as overly flowery, needlessly complex, and bombastic in nature.
Pre-Revolutionary War, 1767-1776
United through a love of literature and philosophy, Trumbull, Dwight, and Humphreys formed a friendship based on intellectual curiosity and artistic expression. They were particularly interested in the “Augustan age” of English literature, a period in the first half of the 18th century when authors were inspired by those of classical Rome (Horace, Ovid, Virgil) during the time of Augustus’s reign. In England, authors like Samuel Butler, Charles Churchill, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, led to the popularity of the novel, the epic poem, and the use of political satire.
As students at Yale, the young Hartford Wits advocated for a more modern and robust curriculum, as evidenced in John Trumbull’s oration, “An Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts,” delivered at the Yale commencement ceremony in 1770. Trumbull expounded on the theme two years later in the first published writing of the Hartford Wits, The Progress of Dulness, where the absurdity of 18th-century educational standards was made clear through characters like Tom Brainless, Dick Hairbrain, and Harriet Simper.
By the time of Joel Barlow’s arrival, the older Hartford Wits had graduated from Yale, yet they still maintained ties in New Haven. Timothy Dwight, who had graduated in 1769, stayed in New Haven to work as a teacher at the Hopkins Grammer School and as a tutor at Yale. David Humphreys graduated from Yale in 1771 and worked as a tutor in a Loyalist-leaning household in New York before returning to New Haven in 1774 to work on his Master of Arts degree. After graduating in 1767, John Trumbull stayed in New Haven to pursue an advanced degree (he passed the bar examinations in 1773).
Thus, it was on the cusp of the American Revolution that the members of the Hartford Wits found themselves in New Haven. The rising tensions between the Colonies and Great Britain were followed closely by the people of Connecticut, not the least of which were students. Upon hearing the news about the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, about 100 Yale students immediately left for Boston to take up arms. Notably, Yale students were exempt from military service, but many answered the call nonetheless – including multiple members of the Hartford Wits.
During the Revolutionary War, 1776-1783
Timothy Dwight was studying to become a minister but joined General Samuel Holden Parson’s “Connecticut Continental Brigade” as chaplain in 1776. His service was short, however, as he was forced to resign a year later to help his mother with the family estate. (His father, Major Timothy Dwight, a Loyalist during the American Revolution who had moved to Mississippi in 1776 to found a new colony, died in 1777.)
Joel Barlow enlisted in the Connecticut militia and served until he was discharged in August 1776 following the Battle of Long Island. Afterward, he returned to Yale and was able to graduate in 1778. Barlow later volunteered to serve as chaplain for the 3rd Massachusetts Brigade from 1780 until the war’s end.
David Humphreys volunteered for service in July 1776, joining the Continental Army’s 2nd Connecticut Regiment, and saw action at the Battle of Ridgefield and the Raid of Sag Harbor. Humphreys was promoted to a major and became an aide-de-camp to George Washington on June 23, 1780, after serving as an aide to other generals, including Samuel Holden Parsons, Israel Putnam, and Nathanael Greene.
Of the four original Hartford Wits, John Trumbull was the only who did not to serve in the miliary during the American Revolution. Instead of the sword, he picked up the pen. Begun in 1776, his mock epic poem, M’Fingal, was one of the major literary contributions during the Revolution. Modeled largely after Samuel Butler’s 17th-century satirical poem, Hudibras, M’Fingal pokes fun of the stereotypical Connecticut Loyalist. Published in its entirety in 1782, M’Fingal went on to have more than 30 editions in America and England. It is considered to be Trumbull’s masterpiece, but he did not do it alone: he solicited and received feedback from the other Wits.
Although separated often by the harsh realities of the American Revolution, the members of the Hartford Wits continued to write. As John Trumbull was inspired by the events of the Revolution, so too were those who served. David Humphreys, affected by his enlistment in the militia in 1776, wrote what is believed to be the first American sonnet, “Addressed to my Friends at Yale College, on my Leaving them to join the Army.” His service as aide-de-camp to Israel Putnam would later lead Humphreys to write An Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam (1815). During his service, Humphreys also authored A Poem Addressed to the Armies of the United States of America, by “a Gentleman of the Army” in 1780.
After his first stint in the militia, Joel Barlow had returned to Yale to write The Prospect of Peace: A Poetical Composition, which he delivered at Yale College to earn his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1778. Strongly affected by the traitorous actions of Connecticut-born Benedict Arnold, Barlow wrote a sermon called the “Treasons of Arnold and the Glory of America” in 1780 while serving as chaplain with the 3rd Massachusetts. After a dinner with his friend David Humphreys and General George Washington, Barlow was also inspired to begin a long epic poem called Vision of Columbus (1787), which he later expanded and republished as The Columbiad (1807).
After the Revolutionary War, 1783-1800
After the war, the members of the Hartford Wits settled into civilian life, eager to see, like most of the populace, how the idea of the United States of America would be turned into reality. Trained in law and the ministry, two of the Wits left New Haven to settle in Hartford: John Trumbull in 1780 and Joel Barlow in 1781. A friend of both Trumbull and Barlow, Dr. Lemuel Hopkins of Litchfield, Connecticut, came to Hartford in 1784 and became a member of the group.
That year, in 1784, Joel Barlow started a weekly newspaper called the American Mercury, and together he and Lemuel Hopkins helped John Trumbull on a project to “Americanize” the Christian Psalm book. One has to wonder if Noah Webster (1758-1843), a close friend of Barlow’s, was inspired by this project, for he took up a similar one of his own: he began to “Americanize” the English language around that time, publishing A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (aka “The Blue-backed Speller”) in 1783. (In 1833, Webster went on to publish a revision of the King James Bible. His The Holy Bible… With Amendments of the Language attempted to correct grammatical errors, update words, and remove offensive references.)
Connecticut continued to reel from the economic repercussions of the war, and many people, once united over a shared desire for independence from Great Britain, now were divided about how the state (and nation) should best be governed. Along with their literary contributions, some of the Hartford Wits also shared their viewpoints by getting involved with politics. John Trumbull and Joel Barlow were both elected to the Common Council of Hartford in March 1786. That same year, David Humphreys, who had also settled in Hartford after living abroad for a few years after the war, serving as Benjamin Franklin’s secretary and a U.S. intelligence agent, was elected to the Connecticut General Assembly. (Later that year, as head of Connecticut’s state militia, he was sent to Western Massachusetts to deal with the armed uprising of indebted farmers and Revolutionary War veterans known as Shay’s Rebellion.)
Of the original four members of the Hartford Wits, Timothy Dwight was the only one not to take up residency in Hartford. He had taken over the pastorship of Greenfield Hill Congregational Church in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1783 and was operating Greenfield Academy on the side. But he continued to communicate with the Wits and sought their advice on an epic poem that took him almost ten years to complete. The Conquest of Canaan (1785), considered to be the first American epic poem, recounts the Biblical story of Joshua and the Israelites on their journey to conquer the land of Canaan. Dwight dedicated the work to General George Washington, whom he viewed as the modern parallel to Joshua.
The same year, David Humphreys wrote his most popular work, Happiness of America, celebrating the as-of-then uniquely American ideal of freedom. First published in 1786, the book went through ten editions from then and 1804. Following suit, Joel Barlow received advice from his friends on the epic poem he had been working on about the glorious past and promising future of America, which was published in Hartford in 1787 as The Vision of Columbus.
It was at this time, the decade following the American Revolution, that the group was most productive, and, in fact, first became known as the Wits. The members met frequently to discuss politics, philosophy, and literature and began to publish their work in literary journals and newspapers. While providing input on each other’s works, they also joined forces to write a long satire and probably their best-known work: The Anarchiad: A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night. The new United States of America that they envisioned looked not unlike the Connecticut they so loved, and they were alarmed by new populist ideas of individual freedom and secularism. They feared that giving power to people with neither wealth nor education would destroy the steady, hierarchal, and puritanical society they were familiar with. They fought for their vision of the new nation in The Anarchiad, a collaborative effort of the four original Wits – Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight (he sent his contributions from Fairfield), David Humphreys, and John Trumbull – and new member Lemuel Hopkins, who was the principal author. The poem was published in twelve parts, between 1786 and 1787, in the New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine.
As with their time at Yale College, the members came and went in Hartford. In 1790, David Humphreys left the group for Europe where he served as a secret agent for George Washington’s administration. In 1791, the Wits lost another member – Joel Barlow moved to France – but gained a new one when Timothy Dwight’s younger brother, Theodore Dwight (1764-1846), settled in Hartford to practice law. The younger Dwight did not attend Yale but was educated at home by his mother and then studied law with his uncle. Dwight was a talented writer and quickly became a member of the Hartford Wits. He later would also become politically active, serving in both the U.S. Congress and the State Legislature (he later served as secretary of the Hartford Convention in 1814/15).
Along with Theodore Dwight’s inclusion in the Hartford Wits came his brother-in-law, Richard Alsop (1761-1815). Though he did not live in Hartford (he was the son of a prosperous Middletown, Connecticut merchant), Alsop traveled to Hartford frequently on business related to the bookstore his brother operated in the city. Early on, Alsop showed a talent for literary analysis. It was primarily he and Theodore Dwight who worked on a satirical, political poem, The Echo, with Other Poems, which was published in Joel Barlow’s American Mercury in twenty parts between 1791 and 1805 (the entire compilation was published as a book in 1807).
Richard Alsop and Theodore Dwight joined forces with Lemuel Hopkins to author Political Green-House for the Year 1798, a satirical poem capturing the political anxieties of the Federalists during the rise of the Democratic-Republican party. It was published first in the Connecticut Courant on January 1, 1799, and later printed in Hartford by Hudson & Goodwin. Alsop himself is known for a poem that eulogized George Washington, Poem Sacred to the Memory of George Washington (1800).
In 1793, a selection of seventy poems – many of them by Hartford Wits – was published as American Poems, Selected and Original. The poems had been compiled by Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771-1798), a 1786 graduate of Yale and a student at Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Academy. With poems by Richard Alsop, Joel Barlow, Theodore Dwight, Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, John Trumbull, and others, the anthology is considered to be the first general collection of American poetry. (A plan for a second volume was never realized due to Smith’s untimely death from yellow fever in 1798.)
Anthology Selections
John Trumbull: short biography and excerpt from M’Fingal (1782)
Timothy Dwight: short biography and excerpt from The Conquest of Canaan (1785)
Joel Barlow: short biography and excerpt from The Vision of Columbus (1787)