Deism
Like so many other leading figures of the American Revolution who crafted a democratic nation upon ideas of liberty and equality, Freneau religious views tended toward scientific deism. His non-political lyrical poetry expounds upon the basic decency of man as well as the benevolent disinterest of a creator. God does not intervene in the lives of mortals, but is responsible for the beauty and glory of the natural world surrounding him.
The Creation of American Literature
Freneau was at the forefront of envisioning a literature that was unique American and which had been disconnected from the myths, histories and class differences characterizing its European antecedent. Poems like “On the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country” and “Columbus to Ferdinand” are central to Freneau’s concept that the movement westward by Europeans represented a symbolic movement of reason, equality and independent thought. These poems indicate a deeply felt and fervently expressed conviction that American—still primarily an untamed frontier, remember—was the natural inheritor of transfer of culture from ancient Greece and Rome to France and England. The expression of this idea occurred at a time, it is important to keep in mind, when Freneau himself was forced to seek employment in other fields because of the difficulty of making a living as a writer in America.
Jeffersonian Democracy
Both during the American Revolutionary and afterwards, Freneau’s poetry was infused with the ideology of Jeffersonian ideals of democracy. His verse called for the equality of the common man with the privileged man while also extolling the moral superiority of the simple rural personality over the business entrepreneur. His pre-independence poetry rates among the most explicit in calling attention to the unfairness and despotism of the British while afterward he refused to dull his pen in attacking even George Washington when he felt that the President was not doing enough to obstruct the corruption of ideals from the corrupting force of ambition. A particular target for Freneau in both poetry and prose was Alexander Hamilton who represented the opposite end of the American democratic spectrum.
