Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Hugh Henry Brackenridge, (b. 1748,
Kintyre, near Campbeltown, Argyll,
Scot.—d. June 25, 1816, Carlisle, Pa.,
U.S.), American author of the first
novel portraying frontier life in the
United States after the Revolutionary
War, Modern Chivalry (1792–1805; final
revision 1819).
At five
Brackenridge was taken by his
impoverished family from Scotland to a
farm in York county in Pennsylvania.
After a local minister taught him Latin
and Greek, he became a teacher and
worked his way through the College of
New Jersey (now Princeton University),
receiving his B.A. in 1771. For the
commencement exercises he recited “The
Rising Glory of America,” a patriotic
poem that he had written with a
classmate, Philip Freneau, who also was
to make his name in American letters.
Brackenridge went on to get his M.A. in
theology at Princeton in 1774. An
enthusiast for the Revolution, he joined
George Washington’s army as chaplain. He
published two verse dramas on
Revolutionary themes, The Battle of
Bunkers-Hill (1776) and The Death of
General Montgomery at the Siege of
Quebec (1777), and Six Political
Discourses Founded on the Scripture
(1778). In an attempt to promote native
American literature, he established and
edited The United States Magazine in
1779, but it failed within the year.
Brackenridge became a lawyer and settled
in the frontier village of Pittsburgh in
1781, where he helped start The
Pittsburgh Gazette, the first newspaper
in what was then the Far West. After he
was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly
in 1786, he obtained funds to found the
academy that became the University of
Pittsburgh. As mediator in 1794 during
the Whiskey Rebellion, he lost favour
with both sides but wrote Incidents of
the Insurrection in the Western Parts of
Pennsylvania in the Year 1794 (1795).
His leadership of Thomas Jefferson’s
Republican Party won him, in 1799,
appointment as a judge of the Supreme
Court of Pennsylvania, a post he held
until his death. He settled permanently
in Carlisle in 1801.
