The Canongate Burns (43 page)

Though he did not risk publishing it in the Kilmarnock edition, this is Burns's first political poem. It is, thus, seminal in several important ways. For the first time it brings not only the world of late eighteenth-century British but international politics before the wickedly reductive court of Burns's Scottish vernacular energies. Second, it demonstrates for the first time his astonishing powers of compressed narrative. Here he records in a mere nine stanzas not only the genesis of the American War of Independence and politically significant campaigns in that war but also the extreme disruption provoked in British politics by the loss of America. Third, it signals his acutely self-endangering ambition, from his marginal social position, to comment politically on the world of kings and counsellors. As he was soon to write:

Further, that this is a
song
with its thumping (‘man') alternate line repetition entails that he desires maximum public exposure for it. This engenders a triple-headed problem that would increasingly preoccupy him. Would he be allowed to publish it? What final strategies might he employ to disguise the explosive nature of the material? If such strategies, most frequently that of the smiler with the knife, were impossible, how might he get such explosive political material into the political realm without disclosing his authorship?

This song emphasises the first of these problems. He had some thought of placing it in the Kilmarnock edition. He then consulted his Whig patron, the Earl of Glencairn, subsequently writing to his Masonic associate in the Canongate Lodge, Henry Erskine:

That he might upset Glencairn and Erskine, Whig sympathisers with the American cause, seems odd until we consider his treatment of the parliamentarian Rockingham Whigs, Fox and Burke, in the latter part of the poem. He did certainly, however, upset the Tory pro-Hanoverian Edinburgh establishment. It was of this poem that, according to Lockhart (Vol. I, p. 205), Hugh Blair remarked ‘Burns's politics always smell of the smithy'. His card was thus marked from the outset.

This snooty disdain for the allegedly sooty is, embryonically, that pervasive state of mind which, consciously and otherwise, has so successfully sought to exclude Burns as socially inferior poet, no matter his political intelligence, from commenting on his alleged betters. With regard to American affairs, as we have seen in the Introduction, Burns was passionately pro-American. Further, by denying this political element in Burns, Blair was also disguising the strong pro-American republican culture in Edinburgh which Burns knew about both by his membership of the Crochallan Fencibles and his avaricious reading of the Edinburgh press. Alfred A. Kline in a stimulating Columbia University doctorate written as long ago as 1953,
The English Romantics and the American Republic: An
Analysis of the Concept of America in the Work of Blake, Burns,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley
is deeply salutary in two respects. In general terms, it reminds us of the political company which Burns's poetry keeps. Blake's
America
, for example, though mythopoetically distinct from Burns's, is profoundly similar in content. Central to Wordsworth's
Guilt and Sorrow or Incidents
Upon Salisbury Plain
(See commentary on
A Winter Night
) is a hellish vision of the American war as recalled by the returned widowed vagrant of one of the dead British redcoats who, revealingly, became termed in that conflict, ‘bloody-backs': ‘dog-like wading at the heels of War … a cursed existence with the brood/ That lap, their very nourishment, their brother's blood'.

Kline also provides evidence of the degree to which radical elements in Edinburgh were attracted to the American cause. Thus Richard Price's
Letter to the Secretary of the Committee of Citizens in
Edinburgh, The Scots Magazine
(April, 1784), comments:

As we saw in the Introduction, Price was influential for Burns. In January 1791 we find (Letter 430) Burns ordering from Peter Hill Dr Price's
Dissertations on Providence, Prayer, Death & Miracles
. Whether Burns also read Price's subtle, balanced
Observations an the
Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making It A
Benefit to the World
is uncertain. What is certain is that he would have agreed with its provocative sentiments (See
Richard Price:
Political Writings
, ed. D.O. Thomas, Cambridge: 1991). Kline also quotes Professor W.P. Ker, whose scholarship led him to define Burns as a Tory Unionist, saying ‘Burns must have read the newspapers … and
The Scots Magazine
with extraordinary care', to which Kline adds that this included back issues. Thus the first part of this poem is again dependent on Burns transmuting newspaper prose into poetry, as, indeed, is the latter part dealing with the political shambles in Britain consequent to the American defeat.

The first stanza deals with the good Guilford, the Prime Minister, and Lord North, whose wrecking seamanship led to the loss of North America. After the inception of the war by the taxation policy leading to the Boston Tea Party, Burns narrates the campaign leading up to the Americans' (‘Buckskins') culminating in victory with Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, 10th October 1781 with Clinton unable to break though from New York to relieve him.

The second stanza deals with a double pronged American attack in 1775 into Canada against Quebec and Montreal. What is of particular significance is that the second-in-command of the Montreal force was Richard Montgomery, one of the Montgomerys of Coylfield celebrated by Burns in his eulogy to the greatness sprung from Ayrshire soil in
The Vision
. Montreal surrendered to Montgomery who then set down ‘Lowrie's Burn' to support Arnold at Quebec, where he was killed in the assault. What, of course, Burns is implying is the heroism of not just a Scottish but an Ayrshire martyr dying for the American cause.

The third stanza deals with the passive General Gage being replaced by Sir William Howe who, despite his victories over the Americans at Bunker Hill and near Philadelphia could not change the course of the war. Despite his deep reservations at spilling American blood, Howe's army ‘butchered' three thousand colonists and captured many cattle at Peerskill Fort on the Hudson in November 1776.

The fourth stanza narrates the triumph of American arms. General Burgoyne advancing into Albany in the autumn of 1777 was forced to surrender to an American army three times his size at Saratoga on 17th October. Simon Frazer (another Scottish hero) was killed at the battle of Freeman's Farm.