Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Moral Pieces , and the War of 1812

Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Moral Pieces, and the War of 1812 Gretchen Murphy (bio) The opening poem of Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815) announces the volume as written in a nation at war. The speaker of the volume’s introduction presents to the reader her art, figured as a floral wreath and music played upon a harp, despite the fact that the “clang of war / the trumpet roar” (line 5) may scatter her flowers and drown out her song, making her aesthetic achievements matter less than moral and spiritual ones at this tumultuous time. The importance of the War of 1812 to Moral Pieces has gone unremarked by critics, who typically characterize the volume as consisting of juvenilia and didactic pieces intended for classroom use. But as Daniel Wadsworth states in the “Advertisement” that prefaces the volume, “a few of the productions now brought before the public were intended for the use of a School; but the greater part arose from the impulse of the moment” between daily chores.1 This impulse of the moment, I will argue, was the Federalist political crisis the War of 1812, which gripped Hartford in the year 1814 when these pieces were composed. This essay will interpret six poems from Moral Pieces that explicitly figure the War of 1812, placing them in the context of Federalist political response to the war. After providing this [End Page 303] historical context, I will analyze Sigourney’s poetic response to tropes of pro-war poetry, identifying auditory affect, or how feelings sound, as an important conceptual idea in the War of 1812 poetry. A final section will examine Sigourney’s relationship with Federalism in the years following the war. Scholars have perhaps overlooked Sigourney’s partisan approach to the War of 1812 and its prominence in this volume because the war itself barely figures in American historical memory. Its resolution changed no borders or policies, and historians still debate its motivations. The Madison administration cited Britain’s ongoing interference with United States shipping interests, including the impressment of sailors on US merchant ships at sea, as a casus belli. But historians have considered, as factors impelling the crisis, the assertion of US sovereignty, expansion into Canada, and the subjugation of Indian tribes that were using North American political tensions as an opportunity for strategic resistance.2 The war’s starkly partisan nature has also muddied its purpose. Not a single Federalist in Congress voted for the war, which they saw as waged in the interests of their opponents, the Democratic-Republicans who controlled Washington. Federalists, who dominated in the New England states but were a minority in Congress, acted on their objection to the war in various ways, including refusing to send state militia, enabling banks to withhold credit, and finally holding the ill-fated Hartford Convention, where representatives from New England states debated making a separate peace with England.3 Indeed, from the outset, the perception of Federalist disloyalty may have heightened the Madison administration’s willingness to wage war, as rumors circulated that the Federalists were conspiring with the British to break up the union, forming the perception of a convergence of internal and external enemies that the US could oppose in one blow.4 The experience of being cast as an internal enemy motivates the emotional range, pitch, and formal choices of Sigourney’s [End Page 304] war poetry, and, I will argue, animates its trajectory: muted ambivalence, aversion, and shame give way to heroic gendered narratives of rescue in an effort to motivate an audible form of dissent from one’s own nation at war. This negative perception of the Federalists in particular perhaps explains why Sigourney’s War of 1812 poetry has gone unremarked. Critics may have shown little interest in exploring Sigourney’s political commitments to Federalism because finding these linkages would hitch Sigourney to a group with a tarnished historical legacy, one colored not only by these accusations of treachery but also by the perception that their broader political interests in a republican government where wise elites lead with virtue and self-restraint were anti-egalitarian and rearguard.5 Certainly, the war seemed to catalyze...

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