James Nelson Barker

• Born: June 17, 1784
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: March 9, 1858
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Other Literary Forms

Although known chiefly as a dramatist, James Nelson Barker wrote some occasional verse, political poems and orations, and several newspaper essays on contemporary drama. His six biographical essays on notable Americans, including DeWitt Clinton, Robert Fulton, and John Jay, appeared in Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans (1817).

Achievements

In the first half of the nineteenth century, when many American writers were struggling against a literary inferiority complex, James Nelson Barker was among the earliest of American dramatists to break new ground. His The Indian Princess, which took the story of Pocahontas as its central theme, was the first American Indian play ever to be performed. It began a dramatic tradition, providing a motif for American playwrights for the next fifty years. Not until the eve of the Civil War, when drama turned more toward realism, had the Pocahontas material run its course. Barker’s use of the Indian as a literary motif predates by more than ten years the depiction of the Indian in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and in the works of his contemporaries. Barker was thus among the first American writers to use native material as a corrective to what was perceived as the American writer’s servile dependence on European, particularly British, literary influence.

Tears and Smiles, Barker’s first play, contributed to the development of the stage Yankee , that bumbling yet shrewd New Englander whose individualism was distinctively American. Only twenty years after Royall Tylerintroduced the stage Yankee in The Contrast (pr. 1787), Barker created the character of Nathan Yank, a major link in the chain of Yankee plays that were to remain popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

Barker’s crowning achievement was the last of his five extant plays. First performed in 1824, Superstition is one of the earliest dramas to use colonial history as its source. Dealing primarily with the bigotry and fears of a New England village in the late seventeenth century, the play is a tragedy that anticipates some of the ideas and characters later to be found in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is the most controlled of Barker’s dramas, and in its fusion of historical material with convincing character motivation, it remains the best American play of its time.

Biography

The fourth son of John Barker, one of Philadelphia’s foremost citizens, James Nelson Barker was educated in public schools and became, in his early teens, a wide reader. Though he did not go to college, he was familiar enough with some of the world’s great authors to begin, at the age of twenty, his first play, based on a story by Miguel de Cervantes. This play, The Spanish Rover, was left unfinished and has not survived. By 1805, Barker had completed two acts of a proposed tragedy entitled Attila, suggested by his reading of Edward Gibbon’s five-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776, 1781, 1788); this play has also been lost. The only knowledge of these early efforts comes from Barker’s autobiographical account of his dramatic career, written for William Dunlap’s History of American Theatre (1832).

Though these fledgling works attest Barker’s early interest in drama and indicate the scope of his reading, they also make a point about his creative imagination. The subject matter, the setting, and even the characters of both works were foreign. Attila’s Rome and Cervantes’ seventeenth century Spain were far removed from the bumptious America of the early Republic; the results were therefore simple false starts. In contrast, when the occasion arose for the writing of a play with an American milieu as its setting, Barker’s imagination took fire.

That occasion was a hunting trip in 1806. One of Barker’s companions, a theater manager, knowing of the young man’s dramatic interests, asked Barker to write an American play, and a prominent actor of the day, Joseph Jefferson, who specialized in Yankee characterizations, asked that Barker include a Yankee type. Barker set to work, and in forty-three days, he completed his first play, Tears and Smiles, produced the following year. In his preface to the published work, Barker derides the popular opinion among critics that a successful drama had to be European in plot, setting, and character. As if poking fun at himself and his two earlier, abortive efforts, he quotes a fictitious friend who suggests that he, Barker, abandon his scheme of delineating American manners and instead “write a melodrame [sic] and lay [your] scene in the moon.”

Having written one play, Barker, only in his early twenties, turned his youthful exuberance into more worldly pursuits. At this time, the city of Philadelphia had fallen under the spell of a sort of soldier of fortune, General Don Francisco de Miranda. Miranda wanted to liberate Venezuela and in time secure independence for all South America. In pursuit of this goal, he was seeking enlistments, promising wealth and glory to all who volunteered for the cause of freedom. Whether Barker was moved by the democratic fervor of the times or had merely surrendered to the swashbuckling Byronism of the scheme, he nevertheless left for the port of New York in August, 1806, with the idea of joining the expedition in Trinidad, West Indies. News of Miranda’s defeat, however, and a series of letters from his father urging him to come home resulted in Barker’s return to Philadelphia early in 1807.

This frustrated adventure can be seen as a catalyst in Barker’s creative process, for his next play, first acted in March, 1808, was a political satire, The Embargo. Borrowing extensively from a British play by Arthur Murphy, The Upholsterer (1757), Barker’s comedy was to be the most topical of his works. Never printed and since lost, the play was probably heavily allusive to President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo of British shipping in commercial retaliation for British seizures of American vessels during this period when Britain was engaged in a war with France, led by the Emperor Napoleon I. Little else is known about what was probably Barker’s least important work.

In April, 1808, Barker’s third completed play was produced. The Indian Princess was a historically significant production, the first dramatization of the Pocahontas story. The play was enormously influential—so popular, in fact, that, by Barker’s own account to Dunlap, it was eventually acted in every theater in the country. It was also the first original American play to be performed in England after its premiere in the United States.

Barker’s next dramatic work was a trivial affair, an adaptation of Travellers: Or, Music’s Fascination (pr. 1806), by British author Andrew Cherry. A kind of musical panorama, the play was never printed, and though it was a modest success when performed during the Christmas season of 1808, it was, by Barker’s admission, only “a little less absurd” than its original. It has been deservedly forgotten.

After this flurry of dramatic activity, Barker began to sow the seeds of his own political future, probably at the urging and with the help of his father, who was by 1809 the mayor of Philadelphia. Becoming active in the Democratic Party of the city, Barker was sent to Washington, D.C., with letters of introduction from his father to President James Madison. There he served as his father’s lobbyist and listening post; his letters to the mayor, from his arrival in the capital in December, 1809, to his departure in March, 1810, are filled with political gossip, reports of evening balls and social entertainments, and frequent pleas for more money, always postscripted by appropriately filial apologies.

Returning to Philadelphia, Barker met and married Mary Rogers in 1811, took up portrait painting as a hobby, and wrote Marmion. The product of his reading of Sir Walter Scott, the play was not only a dramatization of Scott’s poem of the same title but also a skillful conflation of other sources relating to the subject. In particular, Barker used material from the chronicles of Raphael Holinshed. The result was a play that was fast-paced and tightly structured. Marmion turned out to be Barker’s longest-running stage work. Interestingly, it was his first successful drama on a nonnative subject, and this on the eve of the War of 1812, when national pride and patriotism were rising.

As it did for many, the war enabled Barker to develop his political career. Appointed a regimental captain of artillery, Barker soon saw active service at Fort Erie and at Buffalo, New York. After returning to Philadelphia, he became a principal recruiting officer in the region, mustering several hundred men; served as captain in the Artillery Corps; and was appointed brevet major by 1814.

At the war’s end, Barker ran for the Pennsylvania Assembly on the Democratic ticket. Though defeated, he made many political friends, who helped him a short time later to be appointed a city alderman. It was a crucial political position, for only two years later, in 1819, Barker, like his father before him, became the mayor of Philadelphia. His one-year term, from October, 1819, to October, 1820, was marked by honesty, efficiency, and courage. He trimmed the city budget, cutting his own salary first; raised money for national relief programs; and reorganized the city’s police and militia during a time of civil unrest.

Defeated for reelection, Barker also suffered a deep personal loss: Over the next two years, three of his children died. Barker’s loyalty to the Democratic Party was remembered, however, when Andrew Jackson became president and named Barker to the post of collector of the port of Philadelphia, a political plum, one of the choicest fruits of Jackson’s spoils system. Barker held this post from 1829 to 1838.

Meanwhile, Barker’s literary career continued to flourish. In the midst of his political activities leading to his post as alderman, Barker returned to a native subject for a play. The Armourer’s Escape was a dramatization of John Jewitt’s narrative of his captivity among the Nootkian Indians. Captivity narratives, real or fictional, were popular in England and in the United States during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Jewitt was counting on such literary precedent to promote the sales of his own adventures. His book was a failure, however, and he turned to the dramatist for help. The play was never printed and is now lost.

How to Try a Lover, though written shortly after the Jewitt dramatization, was not produced until almost twenty years later, though Barker remarked to Dunlap that it was the play with which he was most satisfied. Set in thirteenth century Spain, this comedy of love forsworn and finally consummated was based on Charles-Antoine-Guillaume Pigault-Lebrun’s novel La Folie espagnole (1801). This charming, extremely actable play is not representative of that aspect of Barker’s work that is most notable—namely, his use of native material.

Barker’s use of such native sources resulted in his finest work, Superstition. In this work, the use of history meshes with sound dramatic instinct; the drama is regarded as one of the best American plays of the period. Serious, dark, and intense, the play shows a control of plot, character, and language that few dramatists had yet attained and which gains in effectiveness when one remembers that Barker wrote the play in the years immediately following the deaths of his children and his defeat for reelection to the mayoralty.

Although Superstition was Barker’s last play, he continued, throughout the next decade, to supply newspapers and magazines with pedestrian occasional verse, patriotic centennial odes on such themes as the birthday of George Washington and on the founding of the state of Pennsylvania.

The last twenty years of Barker’s life were spent in various positions in the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. The demands of such service effectively curtailed his literary career. He remained a respected figure in Washington until his death.

Analysis

James Nelson Barker must be considered a significant influence in the history of American drama because of his use of native material, together with his lifelong advocacy of a native American theater. His most creative period, from 1808 to 1824, coincided with a growing sense of U.S. literary nationalism, that sentiment by which American authors sought to produce a native literature that reflected the nation’s character, customs, manners, and ideals. The forceful preface to his Tears and Smiles, for example, condemns the reverent attitude of American critics toward European standards. Denouncing these reviewers as “mental colonists,” intellectually submissive to British opinion, Barker calls for a sort of declaration of literary independence, a repudiation of foreign models and an embracing of national cultural material.

Tears and Smiles

Barker’s earliest play, Tears and Smiles, succeeds on two counts. It is, first, a quickly moving, sprightly work, filled with the youthful exuberance of an author in his early twenties. Exuberance, indeed, is a crucial ingredient, for the recipe of plot and character is otherwise spoiled by convention and claptrap. Second, the piece has some genuine historical value as an early example of the portrayal of the stage Yankee, here named Nathan Yank.

Influenced by Tyler’s The Contrast, Tears and Smiles relies on traditional elements of melodrama. Louisa Campdon, the heroine, has been promised by her father to the delicate dandy, Mr. Fluttermore, whose very name is suggestive of characters from Restoration drama. Louisa, however, is in love with Sydney, a young man of recognized valor but uncertain parentage who has returned from Tripoli and the wars against the Turkish pirates to reclaim her love. The Turkish allusions show how alert Barker was to literary and theatrical trends. Tyler had used the motif in his novel The Algerine Captive (1797), and the Turkish or Oriental motif had been popular in the early gothic romances; in addition, operatic composers such as Christoph Gluck, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Gioacchino Rossini (Barker’s contemporary) had staged Turkish operas.

By the end of the comedy, thanks to the intercession of characters such as General Campdon (Louisa’s uncle) and the Widow Freegrace, the lovers are united and the fop appropriately chastened. Sydney is also reunited with his long-lost parents, who have been separated for years and suffered from pirates, slavery, and family disapproval. Such characters and situations were typical of the drama of the period, and Tears and Smiles is grievously weakened as art by its heavy reliance on them.

Still, the play is worthy of attention for its lively humor and satire as Barker pokes fun at Americans’ seduction by European modes and manners. The opening scene quickly clears the ground for satire when Louisa’s uncle protests her proposed marriage to Fluttermore, who, when he left America, was a clever, honest fellow but who has returned from his travels abroad “a puppy . . . with a pale face and a hearty contempt for everything this side of the water.” Meanwhile, Barker skillfully delays Fluttermore’s entrance until near the end of act 1, when Fluttermore saunters onstage with Monsieur Galliard, a combination companion and valet. The scene is humorous, with bluff Jack Rangely, the second lead, shaking hands so cordially that he knocks the powder from Fluttermore’s wig. By giving Fluttermore “Frenchified” rather than Anglicized affectations, Barker provides a variation on the standard portrayal of the British fop and makes a topical point about French influence on American fashion and theater at the time. “I can’t conceive what you possibly do in this corner of the globe,” says Fluttermore, disparaging American manners. “No opera; no masquerade, nor fête, nor conversazione.” Later, writers from Hawthorne to Henry James would seriously lament America’s lack of European refinement, that sense of history and rich cultural precedent, a lack that they saw as a limiting force on the American imagination. Yet here, at the dawn of American literary nationalism, foppish Fluttermore’s denigration of American culture is distinctly comic.

Of special comic interest in Tears and Smiles is Nathan Yank, the first stage Yankee of the nineteenth century. Introduced in Tyler’s The Contrast, this comic figure was to be one of the most popular and enduring types on the American stage. He was generally depicted as an honest, homespun bumpkin who very often was the butt as well as the perpetrator of jokes and whose comic antics were often dramatic set pieces, independent of the main action. Actors such as Joseph Jefferson, George Handel Hill, and Joshua Silsbee made their living playing Yankee characters. “Yankee” Hill was particularly notable for delivering Yankee monologues or yarns, a device that surely must have provided comic precedent for Mark Twain.

Barker’s Nathan Yank added little to the characterization already drawn by Tyler some twenty years before. Nathan retains his predecessor’s bumptiousness, for example, and holds the same status, that of servant, but whereas Tyler’s Jonathan is boorish, he is also his own man. Jonathan shows a Puritan reliance on biblical precept as well as a practical sense of getting on in the world. His love scenes with Jenny, his social equal, prove him to be a man as well as a clown, a man of independent temperament, despite his status as servant.

In contrast, Nathan Yank never goes beyond the range of low comedian. He misdirects his master, Rangely, for example, by mistaking one house for another, and he indulges in a series of puns at the expense of Rangely’s lover. To Rangely, who does not know her name, she is his “incognita,” but Nathan henceforth refers to her as “Cognita.” Inexplicably, Barker drops Nathan from the action by act 4, and Nathan is noticeably absent at the finale in act 5.

Although Nathan’s shallow, one-dimensional buffoonery and his rather peripheral position in the action seem to represent a retrogression or at least a pause in the development of the stage Yankee, there is, on a closer reading of the play, an important advance in his use of dialect. Although Tyler’s Jonathan used dialect inconsistently, shifting arbitrarily from formal English to homely solecism, Nathan Yank is almost always dialectical, more consistently ungrammatical. From his first “I reckon” in act 1 to his “tarnal long” in his last appearance, Yank speaks strictly homespun American. This move toward a more consistent use of dialect was an important step in the transmission of the Yankee type.

The Indian Princess

If Tears and Smiles is notable for its exuberance, The Indian Princess is marked by self-consciousness and a nationalistic sense of purpose. The preface to the printed edition begins with a plea to both critics and theatergoers to take American drama seriously. Barker laments the poor reception American plays have received from critics and publishers, decrying the fact that acknowledged American productions simply die, like orphans, from “total neglect.” As for The Indian Princess in particular, he urges the public not to denigrate the play simply because it “cannot lisp the language of Shakespeare.” Like all living things, he says, American drama must first creep before it can walk. Finally, in a tone that adumbrates the pronouncements of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Barker predicts that America will bring forth “a dramatic genius” once the “stagnant atmosphere of entire apathy” is dispelled.

Though Barker’s remarks may be seen as a self-serving acknowledgment of his pioneering role in the development of native drama, The Indian Princess is far from the work of genius predicted so confidently by its author. Despite its numerous failures, however, the play has genuine merit.

The first play to use the story of Pocahontas as its central idea, The Indian Princess was also the first of Barker’s plays based on an authentic historical text. The advertisement to the 1808 edition credits Captain John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624) as being the principal source, adding that the author has preserved “as close an adherence to historic truth” as the demands of the drama allowed.

An examination of Smith’s account reveals just how cannily Barker used his source material. The Pocahontas episode in Smith (which in the opinion of some historians is of questionable truth) is narrated in the third person and is quickly told in a brief paragraph. The central scene in which Pocahontas puts her own head on the block to save Smith takes only a sentence. Barker casts this somewhat fleeting, almost offhand reference into the central episode of the play. It comes in the opening of act 2, not quite halfway through the three-act drama. Some critics have suggested that this crucial scene comes too early in the play, with the result that the third act tends to be rather anticlimactic.

If the statement in the advertisement about adhering to historical truth is taken as significant of Barker’s intention, then the scene is rightly placed, for it serves as the central link in the chain of historical events that follow—namely, John Rolfe’s love of the Indian Princess and their subsequent marriage, which cemented the bond between the English colonists and an important Indian tribe in the region, headed by Pocahontas’s father, Chief Powhatan. Historically, Powhatan did seek English allies for his fight against the Susquehannocks, and in the closing scenes of Barker’s play such an alliance takes place, both historically and symbolically, when all the lovers are united: Rolfe with Pocahontas; Robin (one of Smith’s men) with Nima, Pocahontas’s lady in waiting; and no less than three other pairs of lovers, Indian and white.

At the end of the play, Smith praises America as the new Eden, a new world “disjoined from old licentious Europe.” This idea of America as a fresh start, an innocent, uncorrupted land untainted by history and therefore rich in human possibility, was a common thread in the skein of American literature during the nineteenth century. Barker’s use of the idea so early in the century points out once again his pioneering sense of literary nationalism.

For all of its dramatic interest, however, the play is not without serious flaws. As in Tears and Smiles, Barker relies on conventional characters and situations, particularly in the scenes involving the minor pairs of lovers, such as Larry, the stage Irishman who loves Kate and who carries a potato in his pocket and commits execrable puns.

The play was originally intended as a straight drama, but Barker was persuaded to turn it into an opera—“an operatic melodrame,” as the title page announces. As a result, some of the scenes are mere interludes, set pieces of vapid verse, set to music by a composer named Bray, which do little to advance the action or to discover character.

The most damaging weakness of The Indian Princess is Barker’s inability to render effective, believable dialogue. The Indians speak, like their white counterparts, in blank verse or in orotund periods. Only on rare occasions does Barker even attempt to distinguish the speech of Indians from that of whites. These attempts often result in such rhetorical infelicities as Powhatan’s exclamation at seeing Captain Smith for the first time: “Behold the white being.” The love scene between Pocahontas and Rolfe is tender, evocative, and romantic, but echoes of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet make Pocahontas’s blank verse difficult to credit:

Thou art my life!I lived not till I saw thee, love; and nowI live not long in thine absence. . . .

Barker’s failure to treat the Indian in other than romantic terms (even the evil medicine man, Grimosco, and the rival, Miami, are but red-skinned gothic villains) typifies the problem faced by the early American writer who recognized the Indian as a legitimate literary property but who could not properly assimilate him into a creditable literary context because of subversive cultural differences.

Superstition

For his finest work, Superstition, Barker once again turned to authentic colonial records. Drawing its main outlines from Thomas Hutchinson’s The History of Massachusetts (1795), Superstition is set in a New England village in 1675. Ravensworth, the minister, is a zealous but cold man who is obsessed with what he sees as “the dark sorcery” practiced by Isabella, a late arrival to the village, who “scorns the church’s discipline” and holds herself aloof from the neighbors. Isabella’s son Charles is in love with Ravensworth’s daughter Mary, an added motive feeding Ravensworth’s obsession.

To this basic plot situation, Barker successfully fuses a second motif, based also on a historical incident. A small group of Puritans who had presided over the execution of Charles I in January, 1649, were forced to flee England at the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Though the majority were later granted amnesty, some were excepted and lived under assumed identities in the New World. Barker drew on this theme of the so-called regicides for the creation of the character of the Unknown, a mysterious figure living in exile in a cave deep in the wilderness. As the play unfolds, the Unknown saves the village from Indian attack by instilling courage and leading the colonists in a counteroffensive. In the end, he turns out to be a regicide and Isabella’s long-lost father, in search of whom she has come to the New World.

The melodramatic elements inherent in this character and in his discovered relationship with Isabella seriously mar the aesthetic integrity of the play. Similarly, Ravensworth, whose obsession ultimately causes the deaths of Charles, Isabella, and his own daughter, has much of the melodramatic one-sidedness of a gothic villain.

Yet the power of Superstition is undeniable. Its effectiveness lies in Barker’s complete mastery in fusing historical event with psychological motivation. The characters’ behavior and their various fates are dramatically represented as largely the results of the historical forces at work; there is an inevitability to the action. Action and character, in fact, are inseparable, as in all effective tragedy. Ravensworth’s single-minded determination to root out “with an unsparing hand/ The weeds that choke the soil,” his conviction that “the powers of darkness are at work among us,” is made clear in the opening scene, and this obsession hangs over the characters and the action as a central, remarkably sustained idea.

There is strong temptation to speculate on the influence of Superstition on Hawthorne, who was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College when the play was first produced. Hawthorne, indeed, would later use the theme of the regicides in his short story “The Gray Champion,” and Ravensworth’s obsession is anticipatory of the diabolic singleness of purpose of Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850); even the similarity of surnames is notable. It could be argued, as well, that Isabella’s independent piety and relative isolation are strongly suggestive of the character of Hester Prynne.

Regardless of whether Superstition was a direct early influence on Hawthorne, it stands on its own as a convincing treatment of a dark episode in American colonial history and as solid evidence of Barker’s legacy to the American theater.

Biliography

Moody, Richard. America Takes the Stage. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1955. Reprint. Milwood, N.Y.: Krause Reprints, 1977. The author particularly notes Barker’s use of native themes and characters. Though his The Indian Princess was the first play in which Pocahontas appeared as a principal figure, Barker relied too closely on the undramatic nature of his source, John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1642), and presented the famous scene too early. Much of the rest of the play is thus anticlimactic.

Musser, Paul. James Nelson Barker, 1784-1858. St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970. This definitive study, though brief, traces Barker’s life and career from his early education in Philadelphia to his political career as collector of the port during the administration of President James K. Polk. Musser includes the complete text of Tears and Smiles and sees Barker as a writer who, by temperament and training, was a leading advocate of native material in American drama.

Richards, Jeffrey, ed. Early American Drama. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. This discussion of early American plays contains an analysis of Barker’s The Indian Princess, along with descriptions of other early works.

Scheckel, Susan. “Domesticating the Drama of Conquest: Barker’s Pocahontas on the Popular Stage.” American Transcendental Quarterly 10, no. 3 (September, 1996): 231-243. The author discusses Barker’s The Indian Princess in its historical context.

Vaughn, Jack A. Early American Dramatists from the Beginnings to 1900. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. One chapter presents a short study of Barker’s five extant plays. Though noting Barker’s use of melodrama and sentimentality, Vaughan also says that Barker knew how to write effective drama and could be “genuinely moving,” especially in Superstition, probably his best play.