This Happy Land: William Cobbett on America 1794-1835

by Molly Townsend

"I have often been rebuked for endeavouring to draw the public attention to America", Cobbett complained in November 1814. He had spent eight years in Philadelphia in the 1790s where, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Porcupine, he had shot to fame as a pamphleteer and political journalist.

After he returned to England in 1800, he founded his own newspaper, The Political Register, and from then until his death in 1835, he closely followed and reported on affairs across the Atlantic. His years in Philadelphia had left him with a lifelong interest in the new republic of the United States and he devoted many columns in his newspaper to American affairs.

Although Cobbett's writings as Peter Porcupine have received much attention from his many biographers and critics, his later writings on America during the thirty years from 1802-1835 have been almost completely ignored. Yet they give a unique picture of those important and turbulent years when relations between Britain and the United States were at their lowest ebb. .

Spanning the Presidencies of Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, Monroe, J Q Adams and Andrew Jackson, Cobbett's penetrating and often witty analysis of the issues involved, enlivened by his sometimes wicked sketches of the protagonists in the disputes; his open admiration of the new republican form of government across the Atlantic and of its "gentle, generous and affectionate" citizens; and his courageous championship of the United States during the two and a half years of the Anglo-American War of 1812, make compelling reading.

Of even more interest, perhaps, is that underlying all Cobbett's writing at the time is his deep concern that the people of Britain and America, born of the same stock and speaking the same language, should resolve their differences and act in harmony together on the world stage.

Molly Townsend was a graduate of the London School of Economics. She published a number of articles on different aspects of Cobbett's writings in various journals and magazines including The Ecologist, History Today, The Banker, Country Life, etc, and published a book Not by Bullets and Bayonets: Cobbett's Writings on the Irish Question 1795-1835 (Sheed and Ward 1983).

She was a member of the William Cobbett Society for many years and was its Chairman and the editor of its annual journal Cobbett's New Register.

Her interest in Cobbett stemmed from the fact that she was a direct descendant of Cobbett's elder brother, George Cobbett, and had heard him talked about from an early age.