ABSTRACT
America did not have to wait for Richard Henry Lee’s motion in Congress on 2 July, 1776, or for its proclamation two days later, to be pictured as an independent nation. When a young student of literature called John Trumbull took his master’s degree at Yale in 1770, his valedictory oration included verses on the ‘Prospect of the Future Glory of America’. A year later Philip Freneau said goodbye to the College of New Jersey with a long dialogue in decasyllabic blank verse read out and partly composed by his classmate Hugh Brackenridge, later editor of the United States Magazine and author of the novel Modern Chivalry. The great American foundation narrative in this tradition is Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus, revised and expanded as The Columbiad. Both Barlow and Freneau were warm supporters of the revolution; both held various government jobs.
