University of Houston • University of Houston-Clear Lake • ISSO Annual Report Y2002—pp. 119-123

Irving N. Rothman (UH)

JOSEPH DENNIE (1768-1812) WAS ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL editors in the United States in the early Republic. From 1801-1812, Dennie edited The Port Folio, a Philadelphia magazine, which espoused Federalist politics. Dennie was conservative in his politics, aristocratic in his demeanor, classical in his literary taste, and an unrelenting critic of President Thomas Jefferson (1734-1826) .¹ The Port Folio produced a considerable body of anti-Jeffersonian prose and poetry.

Dennie’s conservative bias had him sceptical of air travel by hot-air balloon. When Dennie was twenty-five years old, Jean Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809) attempted to sail his balloon in Philadelphia on January 9, 1793. Blanchard had achieved fame along with an American physician, Dr. J. Jeffries, eight years earlier, on January 7, 1785, when they proved to be the first humans to cross the English channel in a hot-air balloon.2

Dennie may have encouraged criticism of Blanchard whose views were totally antithetical to his own. Blanchard, a French republican—a political liberal in l8th-century France—not only supported American democracy, but also sought to demonstrate the prowess and power of Democracy by making his ascent in Philadelphia, at the heart of the American Republic. Prior to his Philadelphia demonstration, he had flown balloons forty-four times.³ Dennie proved wary of ballooning and considered experiments a scientific venture fraught with peril.

Eighteenth-Century Thought
Flight in the eighteenth-century was a preoccupation. It absorbed the attention of Samuel Johnson (1709-84), the august author of the English Dictionary, and the most prominent writer of his time in England. The potential of flight is a theme in his Rasselas (1759), a series of narrative episodes. One has an inventor fabricate a set of wings enabling him to fly with the wings harnessed to his shoulders. The inventor explains to Rasselas, the Prince of Abyssynia, the importance of his project. In flight, he says, one can "see the earth, and all its inhabitants, rolling beneath him, and presenting to him successively, by its dirunal motion, all the countries within the same parallel. . . . to see the moving scene of land and ocean, cities and deserts! To survey with equal security the marts of trade, and the fields of battle; mountains infested by barbarians, and fruitful regions gladdened by plenty, and lulled by peace!" He anticipates the use of aircraft to map the terrain: "How easily shall we then trace the Nile through all his passage; pass over to distant regions, and examine the face of nature from one extremity to the other!"⁴

Rasselas worries that man in flight might fall from his great height and kill himself: "I suspect that from any height where life can be supported there may be danger of too quick descent."⁵ The inventor’s response is apocryphal: "Nothing," replied the artist, "will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome."⁶ The inventor. of course, fails at his effort. Jumping off a promontory he plummets into the sea below. His wings serve only to keep him afloat in the water until he reaches dry land.

Balloon Flight
Balloon flight had progressed rapidly after the experiments of Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier (1756-85) and his first balloon ascension in Paris in October l783, rising only fifty feet from the earth. The following month on November 21, 1783, he and the Marquis d’Arlandes achieved the first protracted aerial flight, "ascending from the castle la Muette" and sustaining flight for 25 minutes. Vincent Lunardi, an Italian and secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador, Prince Caramanico, appears to have been the first to introduce balloons into Great Britain with an initial flight on Sept. 15, 1784, three months before the death of Samuel Johnson on Dec. 13, 1784.6 During his flight, he drank a glass of wine and ate a leg of chicken while suspended in a gondola beneath his balloon.⁷

In the United States, Philip Freneau, a Democrat and American francophile, celebrated balloon flight in a lengthy poem "On the Progress of Balloons" in which he acknowledges advantages in both military operations and commerce. The poem first appeared in the Freeman’s Journal on December 22, 1784.8 Freneau begins with the traditional tribute to the muses of music and lyric song:

Assist me, ye muses, (whose harps are in tune)
To tell of the flight of the gallant balloon! (ll. 1-2)

He marvels at the genius of modern science:

But who would have thought that invention could rise
To find out a method to soar to the skies,
And pierce the bright regions, which ages assign’d
To spirits unbodied, and flights of the mind.
Let the gods of Olympus their revels prepare—
By the aid of some pounds of inflammable air . . . (ll. 13-18)

Favoring the French over his adversaries the British, Freneau speaks of air superiority over the might of sea power:

How France is distinguish’d in Louis’s reign!
What cannot her genius and courage attain? (ll. 21-22)
...............
At sea let the British their neighbours defy—
The French shall have frigates to traverse the sky,
In this navigation more fortunate prove,
And cruise at their ease in the climates above.
If the English should venture to sea with their fleet,
A host of balloons in a trice they shall meet,
The French from the zenith their wings shall display,
And souse on these sea-dogs and bear them away. (ll. 25-32)

Freneau envisions air transportation replacing stage coaches because it offers a mode of travel far faster than the coaches, which could run at ten miles per hour:

But now, to have done with our planets and moons—
Come, grant me a patent for making balloons—
For I find that the time is approaching—the day
When horses shall fail, and the horsemen decay.
Post riders, at present (call’d Centaurs of old)
Who brave all the seasons, hot weather and cold,
In future shall leave their dull poneys behind
And travel, like ghosts, on the wings of the wind.* (ll. 60-68)

*Editor’s Note: Pronounce "wind" like "behind," with an Irish lilt, and the words will rhyme, as they did in the 18th century.)

Air travel will take over trade routes:

Yet more with its fitness for commerce I’m struck;
What loads of tobacco shall fly from Kentuck,
What packs of best beaver—bar-iron and pig,
What budgets of leather from Conocoheague! (ll. 85-88)

Joseph Dennie (1768-1812), the celebrated editor of the Philadelphia Port Folio, was caught up in ballooning when he wrote to his parents from Charlestown, New Hampshire, lamenting the fact that they had not received a letter he had mailed them and regretting their absence from each other: "I wish for a cap of Fortunatus or Balloon of Lunardi to transport me to a Father’s house."⁹

Philip Freneau looked forward to the ballon flight of Jean Pierre Blanchard (1753-1809) scheduled on the Walnut Street Prison Court in Philadelphia, on January 9, 1793, and celebrated that event with his poem "On Balloons," published in the National Gazette, January 2, 1793, one week prior to Blanchard’s balloon lift-off :¹⁰

Ye sages, who travel on mighty designs
To measure equators and tropical lines.
Instead of a vessel, to traverse the seas
Engage a balloon and you’ll do it with ease. (ll. 25-28)

Freneau has expectations of success in flight:

By science taught, on silken wings
Beyond our groveling race you rise,
And soaring from terrestrial things
Explore a passage to the skies—
O, could I thus exalted sail,
And rise with you beyond the jail. (ll. 1-6)

In his Philadelphia balloon voyage on January 9, 1793, Blanchard "took off from the Walnut Street Prison Court and, after forty-six minutes in the air and three attempts to descend, came down in Deptford Township, Gloucester Country, in New Jersey." The story is told that Blanchard so frightened New Jersey farmers who had never before seen an "aeronaut" that one of them ran to his house for his gun to shoot down this heaven-bound menace.¹¹

Some looked upon a flight into the sky with trepidation. John Steele, Comptroller of the Treasury, anticipated disaster in a letter he wrote on the day of the flight: "Today a balloon about the size of a small hay stack went up with a man in it, for several miles in the air. . . . I could not help trembling for his safety. As he was going up he took off his hat, and bowed the bystanders, when about half a mile high, and from that to a mile high he waved his flag beautifully."¹² Perhaps he recalled the experience of Peter Carnes a balloonist from Baltimore who had attempted a balloon flight at the same site on July 17, 1784. Philadelphia citizens were shaken when Carne’s balloon caught fire high in the sky where it appeared in the distance no larger than a small barrel. The fire was caused by the wood-burning furnace that heated the balloon in flight. Onlookers were horrified at the prospect of Carnes having perished in the fire. The following day, however, they discovered that Carnes had been knocked from the gondola when it struck a wall as the balloon ascended.¹³ Carnes survived the episode, but the weightless balloon shot up into the sky in such a rapid and uncontrolled flight that the fire proved not a tacit failure of technology, but the logical consequence of an unattended balloon.

Freneau reminds readers of the National Gazette of the ill-fated effort of the celebrated balloonist Decker to fly a balloon in New York City in January, 1789:

... the balloon (which was made of raven’s duck) took fire, and it was with some difficulty the aeronaut escaped from the conflagration with the loss of his whiskers, a skin considerably scorched by the blaze, and the pursuing curses, menaces, and execration of one or two thousand subscribers [who had financed the flight]."¹⁴

He urged Decker, in a letter sent to the aeronaut on July 29, 1793, to attach one of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods (i.e., conducting rods) to the balloon or gondola to ward off the danger of thunderbolts in flight.¹⁵ In a dream-like vision enunciated in this letter, Freneau anticipates interplanetary travel: "... I fancied all intercourse between the planets to be carried on by means of wings and balloons, and that a distinct class of men, natives of all the planets, were engaged in this business and might more properly be called planetary citizens, mere birds of passage, than considered as belonging to any one planet." Freneau discovers that space flight is both expensive and dangerous: "The struggle cost an immense treasure and the precious lives of thousands of our brethren."¹⁶

Space Hazards: The Fate of Phaeton
For those who chose to moralize upon the nature of space flight—balloons having caught the fancy of inventors and flyers in England, France, Italy, and the United States—no better paradigm existed than that of Phaeton, the son of Apollo, the sun god. To ingratiate himself with his son Phaeton, Apollo (or Helios) offered the boy any gift he desired. To his dismay Phaeton asked to drive the chariot of the sun. Phaeton’s ambitious but erratic control allowed him to fly so close to the sun and distant from Earth that life on Earth froze and then so close to Earth that he created drought from the heat and saw fissures split the dry ground. To halt this undisciplined flight through space, Zeus hurled a thunderbolt at Phaeton who fell from his chariot to earth and to his death.¹⁷ Travel into space in classical mythos could inform the imagination of its heavenly aspiration, or it could lead to a fiery and untimely death for space travellers.

The memorial to the Wright Brothers—a wing-shaped pylon with sculptures on the side featuring a sun sending its rays in to the heavens—reminds visitors to Kitty Hawk of the dangers of space experimentation and flight. On the bronze doors, of the monument images of Phaeton* are carved. One panel has Phaeton falling to his death. The hazards of flight are accentuated in Greek myth, in early ballooning, in the development of the modern airplane, and in space travel.

Joseph Dennie, though he seemed caught up in ballooning fervor in 1791, ultimately felt that ballooning was destined to failure and that balloonists were likely to endanger themselves. In The Port Folio of October 16,1802, he expressed his scepticism; he found inexplicable man’s stubborn persistence in ballooning in spite of its hazards and though forewarned of potential disaster: "It might be imagined that the age of Aeronauts was passed, and that even a French head would not be giddy enough to thrust itself into a Balloon after those fragile vehicles had reeled and tumbled among the clouds, to the disgrace of the new Philosophy. But notwithstanding the vain flights of Blanchard, and the fatal fall [in France of 1785] of P. Rosier, it seems the Lunar project of soaring to the skies is not yet relinquished."¹⁸

Dennie held modern science suspect. He chose the occasion to mock balloon flights by publishing a burlesque entitled "Monsieur Le Chat’S Description of the Aerial Excursion with Monsieur and Madam Garnerin In Mr. Garnerin’s Balloon."¹⁹

In his preface to the story of Garnerin’s cat, he suggests that Garnerin initiated the flight as a profit-making venture more than as a scientific experiment. The crowd watched Garnerin and his wife ascend in a hot air balloon to entertain "the London mob, who have the same asinine stupidity and the same sheepish inclination to throng together, as a Pennsylvania mob, have run gaping after this madcap, and [who] have given him all the pence they could rake, or they could steal, to see his flimsy, tiffany globe of inflation."²⁰ This jeremiad is followed by the account of the cat who had, as other balloonists before him, ascended from the gondola of the balloon to terra firma by parachute.

The cat in the sky contemplates his new advantage in flight that would enable him to chase birds by balloon, an application that had bypassed Samuel Johnson: "I was musing upon the use to which balloons might be applied by cats on pursuit of the feathered race."²¹ Although he had an inclination to eat a leg of chicken in space as had Lunardi’s wife, the cat is persuaded by Mrs. Garnerin to devour, instead, a lactose dish (i.e., a dish of milk).

The cat next volunteers to parachute to earth, having reason enough to feel safe, for he is an animal with multiple lives: "I instantly claimed the honour of this hazardous mission, observing, that I had nine lives, and was ready to sacrifice one of them for so much beauty." The cat is placed in a basket and parachuted to earth. He suffers unexpected jolts: "I have been used to sudden and violent falls from the roofs of the highest houses, but never did I experience so dreadful a shock. For the first 50 yards I fell with the most astonishing velocity, but the parachute had now become fully expanded, and my descent after was gradual, but still too rapid for observation." The cat descends to earth where the parachute is torn to pieces by countrymen who wish to reduce any danger that might ensue from the wind’s dragging the cat on the ground. They may also, to their own advantage, "preserve the shreds [of the parachute] as the most precious reliques." Thus, the satire sustains itself with the cloth of the parachute being regarded as a holy relic and held, in derision, with as much fervor as one might hold the garb of a saint.

In reproducing the adventure of the cat from a British periodical, Dennie completes his attack upon modern invention. He chose to ignore the scientific data that would have had him appreciate modern invention. He lacked the foresight to comprehend the potential applications of aerial flight although a considerable body of early and contemporary literature would have informed him of advances being made in flight research.

*An analogous myth has the Greek (or Cretan) architect Daedalus create wings for himself and his son Icarus enabling them to escape Sicily. Icarus flies too near the sun, his wings melt, and he falls to his death. The monument at Kitty Hawk is meant to identify Phaeton’s unique tragedy, for it is he who rode a vehicle into space, and not Icarus who wore wings.

Notes
¹I. N. Rothman. "Structure and Theme in Samuel Ewing’s Satire, the ‘American Miracle,’" [in The Port Folio]. American Literature 40 (1968): 294-308. Dennie published Samuel Ewing’s poem, which levelled an attack on Jefferson who had supported an archaeological expedition for the search of the bones of a Mammoth elephant. Ewing also complained of Jefferson’s intent to use foreign labor to establish a wine industry in Virginia, as well as Jefferson’s affair with his black slave Sally Hemings.
²L. Leary. "Phaeton in Philadelphia: Jean Pierre Blanchard and the First Balloon Ascension in America, 1793," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 61.1 (1943): 51.
³L. Leary, 52.
⁴Samuel Johnson: The Major Wo r k s. Donald Greene, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. 344. Note the effect of ballooning on later military maneuvering, in F. Stansbury Haydon, Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies, with a Survey of Military Aeronautics prior to 1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1941), in L. Leary 60.
⁵Ibid., 345.
⁶D. D. Jackson, The Aeronauts. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1981. 43-46. On Lunardi, in The Letters of Joseph Dennie, 1768-1812, ed, L. G. Pedder (Orono, Maine: University Press, 1936): "Fortunatus, the hero of a popular European chap-book, stole from the treasure-chamber of a sultan a cap which would transport its wearer wherever he wished," p. 78, fn. 2-3.
⁷L. Leary, 49.
⁸See The Federal Gazette, Jan. 10, 1793.
⁹The Poems of Philip Freneau: Poet of the American Revolution. F. L. Pattee, ed. for the Princeton Historical Association. Vol. 2. Princeton: The University Library, 1903. 277-79.
¹⁰"On Balloons," The National Gazette 2.19 (Jan. 2, 1793), 76; variant lines in "The Progress of Balloons": "Ye sages, who travel on mighty designs, / To measure meridians and parallel lines—/ The task being tedious—take heed, if you please—Construct a balloon—and you’ll do it with ease." (The Poems of Philip Freneau. Ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (Princeton: The University Library, 1902-07. 2 (1902): 277.
¹¹Described in the National Gazette 2.24 (Jan. 19, 1793), 95; also, The Mail or Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser, Jan. 24, 1793, in L. Leary 51.
¹²L. Leary, 51.
¹³L. Leary, 55. Steele’s fear is one of the issues in Archibald Henderson’s "Washington and Aeronautics," Archive [Duke University] 44 (1932): 5-15.
¹⁴L. Leary, 51.
¹⁵The Prose of Philip Frenau, 305.
¹⁶Ibid., 308.
¹⁷T. Bulfinch, Mythology. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1959. Chp. 5, passim; prose rendition of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C.-A.D 17), Metamorphoses, Bk. 1: 1007-52.
¹⁸J. Dennie, The Port Folio, Oct. 16, 1802, 322.
¹⁹Ibid., 322.
²⁰PF, Oct. 16, 1802, 322-23.
²¹Ibid., 322-23.

The volumes of The Port Folio, in the Special Collections Library of the University of Houston, were purchased in 1969 from Mrs. Elmer J. Rodenberg of Henderson, Kentucky. Mrs. Rodenberg received the volumes from Mary Posey Foote, her cousin. Mrs. Foote and Mrs. Rodenberg’s mother where granddaughters , and she, the great granddaughter, of Judge James Hall, brother of John Elihu Hall, editor of The Port Folio in its final years. The purchase was funded by the Friends of the Library; travel funds for Dr. Rothman to effect the purchase in 1969 were provided by Dr. Alfred Neumann, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Research Goals
Dr. Irving N. Rothman in 2001 conducted research in the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to study Dennie’s letters and to research variants of the poetry of The Port Folio in The Philadelphia Souvenir. Dr. Rothman is currently preparing an anthology of the poetry of The Port Folio. He has selected poems from a large corpus of works suitable for inclusion, to be categorized according to literary genre—odes, pastoral poems (eclogues and epithalamia), elegies, georgic poetry, mock-heroic poems, and satires, including John Quincy A d a m s ’ translations of the Latin poet Juvenal and Alexander Wilson’s national topographical poem The Foresters.

Acknowledgements
The Institute for Space Systems Operations (ISSO) provided supplementary travel funding to support a trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where correspondence from Joseph Dennie is housed. Initial funding had been provided by the Limited Grant-in-Aid program of the Office of Research. The University Scholars Program has provided support for student assistance in the preparation of a book on original poetry in The Port Folio. Text for the anthology has been input into the computer and proofread by University Scholar awardees Brandy Towers-Egli and Tara Mullee. James Hall, doctoral student in English, also devoted effort to computer input and proofreading services for the forthcoming anthology.

UH PI: Irving N. Rothman, Ph.D., Professor
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204-3013
Phone: (713) 743-2962; Fax: (713) 743-3215
E-mail: irothman@uh.edu