“A Most Uncertain Response to the Declaration of Independence . . . .”

The interesting thing about the relationship of post-colonial American literature to the events of 1776 is the way in which a pious regard for the nation’s founders and for the enterprise which they set in motion has, among our writers, co-existed with a most uncertain response to the Declaration of Independence itself and to the loftiest aspirations which gather upon that text. Said another way, American Literature has offered an unambiguous yes to our national existence but only a hesitant maybe to the official rationale given that existence by those who made it forever separate from its British roots. Now this is not to argue that there is a serious American literature which is simply hostile to the sweeping generalities of the opening lines of the Declaration. But neither is there a good or successful literature rooted in those generalities. The noisy democratic moments of Whitman or his heirs are too remote from the texture of American history, too eschatological or obfuscatory to contain the “impurity” which Mr. Robert Penn Warren has argued is natural to great art. And the same holds true for Thomas Wolfe’s “inclusive” moments. The lyric/patriotic works no better than the democratic/propagandistic. Only in bitter or ironic moments of complaint about the unfulfilled national promise—only in negation—is the political side of the dream of the new Eden the raw material for our collective imagination. And even then, the implication is very often that the vision of the Declaration should not have been so hopeful as it was: should not have engendered expectations which all reasonable men have known from the beginning of time were contrary to the dispositions of human nature and beyond the reach of man’s political craft.

A good point of departure for documentation of these generalizations is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” As you will recall, the story concerns Young Robin who has come up to the town from the bosom of his family, there to seek his fortune as the kinsman of its principal citizen. But instead he becomes party to the expulsion of Major Molineux from his proprietary responsibilities, becomes (Hawthorne suggests) a minion of that spirit of envy which is so often at the bottom of democratic political rhetoric. But at the end of this dark night of revolution (for Q. D. Leavis tells us that this is a parable of 1776), Robin takes pause, thinking that he is now without patronage and left alone in the midst of anonymous strangers, with only confusion and temptation for guides. And he is not at all certain that he has spent his first evening of manhood wisely. Even so, he determines to make the best of this new world of absolute possibility and refuses to flee back toward the pastoral simplicity from whence he came. Robin is, of course, all of us at that desperate moment of severance from the European thing. And his ambiguity is the ambiguity of which spoke in my beginning.

Herman Melville is, we all recognize, well-known for his moments of enthusiasm for a manly brotherhood before the mast. But we must remember before we simplify him the antipodal commentary of certain chapters of Mardi and his fulminations about the “dark ages of democracy” in Clarel. Likewise the whole of Billy Budd is, as I persist in reading it, the reluctant, qualified but nonetheless overwhelming affirmation of the Burkean Captain Vere. Of Vere who knows better than to think too much on the “rights of man,” abstractly construed! After 1861 Melville is not very useful as an egalitarian paradigm.

And we can go on a bit further, with Twain and Cooper: with all the heavy ironies of Huck and Jim as one thing on the raft and another on the shore, with the outrage of Cooper’s Littlepage sequence and the uneasiness of The American Democrat. To this we could add observations on Cooper’s novels of the sea and a footnote for the despair for his country that touched the elder Twain, that, says Henry Nash Smith, informs the conclusion of The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

But I prefer to conclude my case with a Southern testimony. For despite the fact that the South has always been uneasy about the Declaration of Independence, no American region has taken that instrument with greater seriousness or recognized more consistently as its significance unfolded, its inescapability and its connection with our troubles. My text here is William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses—especially its central section, “The Bear.” In the commissary house debate between Isaac McCaslin and his cousin, Cass Edmonds, the question of America’s peculiarity, its special and redemptive role in human affairs, frames Isaac’s resignation of his inherited responsibilities. Out of a misunderstanding of human character and of the American Indian theory of property, Isaac withdraws from a later America where the doctrines of the Declaration are not to be enforced. In “Delta Autumn” we are shown the consequences of his idealism in the aggravation of the very condition to which he originally objected and with which he was, of all his kind, best able to deal. And in the title story, “Go Down, Moses,” we are given reassurance that the Mississippi version of the national enterprise will continue to operate with a modicum of humanity despite its obvious indifference to “self-evident truths” of the non-hierarchical variety. But this is not to say that Faulkner included an extensive allusion to the democratic dream in his masterpiece only to denigrate those fond hopes and aspirations. On the contrary, his burden is far more complicated than the rhetorical categories of praise and blame would allow.

And this has been precisely my theme in the foregoing brief remarks: that American literature has explored the three-sided dialectic of liberty, equality, and the momentum of national history and has informed us (as our politicians and political philosophers, even de Tocqueville, have on the whole neglected to do) that we began with all of these in a very delicate balance and that we are not ourselves in any one of them alone. Or that at least, we should not wish to be.

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This essay was formatted for publication by Chase Steely. Alan Cornett discovered it while preparing a bibliography on M.E. Bradford in the late 1990s.

Bradford, M. E. (Melvin Eustace), 1934-1993. “A Most Uncertain Response to the Declaration of Independence.” In American Literature and the Bicentennial; Papers presented at a symposium sponsored by East Texas State University at the Conference of College Teachers of English of Texas, Dallas, March 15, 1973, edited by James E. Mulqueen, pp. 7-9. Commerce: East Texas State University Press.

M.E. Bradford

Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford (1934-1993) was a conservative political commentator and Professor of Literature at the University of Dallas.. He was the author of A Better Guide than Reason: Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the Constitution, Founding Fathers: Brief Life of the Framers of the Constitution, and The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary & Political.

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