Jonathan Odell | Biography

Jonathan Odell was a master of Loyalist invective who poured satirical verse into Rivington's New York Royal Gazette and other Tory publications throughout the Revolution. A true believer who found no redeeming virtues in his foes, he had little use for half measures. Even when he turned to such auspicious topics (for Loyalists) as the king's birthday or the British victory at Savannah in 1779, Odell rarely forgot entirely about his Yankee enemies or his mission "to poison with the pen / These rats, who nestle in the Lion's den!"

Odell acquired his Loyalist fervor honestly, if somewhat circuitously. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Temperance Dickinson Odell, a daughter of Jonathan Dickinson, and John Odell, a descendant of William Odell, who had been among the founders of the Massachusetts colony. Jonathan's maternal grandfather was the first president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), and Jonathan graduated from that school in 1759, before becoming a surgeon in the British army. He was stationed in the West Indies for a time, then left the army and went to England to study for the ministry. He was ordained in January 1767.

Later that year, just as the Townshend Act was stirring old resentments about taxation, he returned to New Jersey as an Anglican missionary to St. Ann's Church in the town of Burlington. In 1771 he also began to practice medicine, and on 6 May 1772 he married Anne De Cou.

While regretting what he viewed as ill-advised British taxes, Odell avoided political debates. Nevertheless, as a minister of the Church of England, he was increasingly suspected of having Loyalist sympathies. In October 1775 he was arrested and interrogated after two of his private letters had been intercepted and found to contain unfavorable statements about Congress. Passions on both sides intensified in the next few months, and on 4 June 1776 he made his Loyalist sympathies public in an ode for the king's birthday.

Odell wrote the "Birthday Ode" to be sung by a group of British officers who had been taken prisoner by General Montgomery and were being held in Burlington. They were allowed to observe the day with an entertainment and dinner on a small island in the Delaware River. The ode itself is undistinguished occasional verse. Eight of its twelve stanzas celebrate "George's happy sway" in conventional phrases that might have come from any of William Whitehead's many birthday odes for George III. However, four stanzas in the center become a commentary on George's American subjects: "Sons of Briton, fierce and blind." That line and others like it were intolerable to American patriots in New Jersey. The people of Burlington threatened Odell in July and chased him from his house and family in December. For a few days he hid near the town. Then on 18 December he made good his escape to New York and the safety of the king's arms.

Staying in New York through the remainder of the war, he made himself indispensable to the British in a variety of roles: translator, chaplain, intermediary in the Benedict Arnold-John André conspiracy, and assistant secretary to commander-in-chief Sir Guy Carleton. He also wrote the satirical poetry on which his reputation now depends.

Perhaps the best known of these poems is his brief "Inscription for a Curious Chamber-Stove, in the Form of an Urn, so Contrived as to Make the Flame Descend, Instead of Rise, from the Fire: Invented by Doctor Franklin" (1776). In it Odell attacks Benjamin Franklin, claiming that the brilliant inventor had inverted his genius to serve mere fame and sedition, just as his famous stove was supposed to have caused its flame to burn downward. This poem appeared in several newspapers and was reprinted in popular magazines, such as the Gentleman's Magazine, in England and America.

"The Feu de Joie," published in the Royal Gazette in 1779, recounts the British victory at the Battle of Savannah. Heroic couplets laud the bravery of the British defenders and scorn the follies of the Yankees and their French ally D'Estaing. The poem ends with an invitation to the deluded Americans: "Leave those, whom Justice must at length destroy / Repent, come over, and partake our joy."

The American Times , at 822 lines his longest work, was printed along with John André's "The Cow-Chace" in New York early in 1780. Posing as "Camillo Querno, Chaplain to the Congress," Odell summons "the Furies from profoundest hell" to help explain why the times in America are so bad. When the monsters appear, he recognizes many of them as Hancock, Washington, Jefferson, and numerous other patriots. Personifications of Democracy ("With harlot smiles adorn'd and winning grace") and Taxation ("kindler of the flame") also march by for Querno's disapproval. Finally, "Britannia's guardian angel" comes to pronounce judgment on Britain's ungrateful sons: "'At length the day of Vengeance is at hand / Th' exterminating Angel takes his stand.'" The angel ends with a hope that America's times will be better when the pollution caused by these rebels has been purged.

The American Times and virtually all of Odell's shorter poems are hotly partisan. He wrote most of them quickly to get them in the newspapers while events were still fresh in his readers' minds. Like Freneau, he favored frankness and vigor over subtlety; much of his poetry surely resembles what Freneau would have written if Freneau had been a Loyalist. Jonathan Odell was an adept writer of caustic, popular verse who served his Loyalist friends well indeed--both Moses Coit Tyler and Vernon Parrington rank him first among Tory satirists--and the British rewarded him after the war with profitable appointments in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia.