Sometimes referred to as the Hartford Wits, the Connecticut Wits were a group of writers who as young men expressed great enthusiasm for republicanism and the American Revolution in the 1770s and early 1780s. Feeling betrayed by the democratic and egalitarian currents of the age, they generally became conservative by the late 1780s and identified with the Federalist Party in the 1790s and early 1800s. Most notable of this group were Timothy Dwight, John Trumbull (cousin of the painter John Trumbull), David Humphreys, Noah Webster, and Lemuel Hopkins. Joel Barlow is also often counted as a Connecticut Wit in his early years, but he never underwent the conservative conversion and retained a commitment to Revolution and the ideals of equality. Most of the writers were from Connecticut and had attended Yale.
Even before the Revolutionary War (1775-83), the Connecticut Wits expected great things of their culture. John Trumbull in 1771 wrote that “America hath a fair prospect in a few centuries of ruling both in art and arms.” Hoping to be in the vanguard of this movement, the Wits became disillusioned, especially in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion (1786-87). Several of the writers had a hand in a long poem, “The Anarchiad,” first published in the New Haven Gazette in 1786 and 1787, criticizing the rebellion. They accused the farmers of seeking luxury and corrupting the republic. The poem declared:
Here shall my best and brightest empire rise.
Wild riot reign, and discord greet the skies.
Awake my chosen sons, in foUy brave.
Stab independence! Dance o’er Freedom’s grave.
However betrayed they may have felt by overreaching farmers and “Each leather-apron’d dunce,” the Wits still had hope for the United States. In his “Greenfield Hill” (1801), Timothy Dwight extolled the virtues of rural Connecticut “where Freedom walks erect, . . . And mild Simplicity o’er manners reigns.” In this vision the farmer becomes a repository of virtue and,
The harmony of life more sweetly blend;
Hence labour brightens every rural scene;
Hence cheerful plenty lives along the green.
See also literature.
Further reading: Edwin H. Cady, ed., Literature of the Early Republic, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969); Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Robert E. Shal-hope, The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1760-1800 (Boston: Twayne, 1990).
World History
