FRENEAU, PHILIP MORIN American poet, patriot, editor and sea-captain, son of a New York wine merchant of French-Huguenot descent, was born on Jan. 2, 1752. Graduating in 1771 from Princeton, then a hotbed of "Whiggism," he won fame by 1775 as a satirist of the Tories. His admirable Beauties of Santa Cruz, The Jamaica Funeral and The House of Night (the first American romantic poem in the manner of Poe) were produced during his sojourn in Santa Cruz and the Bermudas from 1775 to 1778. He was captured by the British during the American Revolution and his experience (1780) in a prison ship called forth one of his most mordant satires. After some minor editorships and a few years in the Atlantic coast trade, became clerk of foreign languages for the secretary of State„ Jefferson, and at the same time (1791-93) he exerted his greatest: political influence as independent editor of The National Gazette. Opposed to Fenno's Gazette of the United States—the organ of Hamilton and the Federalists—Freneau as "the leading editor in America" attacked growing ceremonial, aristocratic, centralizing tendencies and disseminated the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and equality upheld by Jefferson, Paine and Rousseau. As Jefferson said, Freneau's paper "saved our Constitution, which was fast gal loping into monarchy." After more minor editorships and several years on the sea, Freneau retired in 1807 to his plantation-like estate, "Mount Pleasant," near Middletown Point, N.J., where he lived until his death on Dec. 18, 183 2. Originally published in newspapers, his poems appeared in five editions during his life time—in 1786, 1788, 1795, 1809 and 1815.
Freneau is remembered as the greatest American poet before Bryant, by virtue of The Wild Honeysuckle; as the "poet of the revolution" who heartened the soldiers in the darkest days of the war ; and as a powerful advocate, in a crucial period, of Jeffer sonian democracy and French political philosophy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Mary S. Austin, Philip Freneau (19oI) ; S. E. Bibliography.—Mary S. Austin, Philip Freneau (19oI) ; S. E. Forman, Political Activities of Philip Freneau in "Johns Hopkins University Studies" (1902) , series xx. No. 9-10; F. L. Pattee, Poems of Philip Freneau (19o2—o7) ; V. H. Paltsits, A Bibliography of the Works of Philip Freneau (1903) ; H. H. Clark, Poems of Freneau (1928) . (H. H. CL.)