H.H. Brackenridge

Who Was H.H. Brackenridge?

Hugh Henry Brackenridge was one of the most intellectually ambitious and satirically gifted writers of the early American republic — a Princeton-educated lawyer, judge, and novelist whose sprawling picaresque Modern Chivalry (published in installments from 1792 to 1815) is the first significant satirical novel in American literature. Born in Scotland and brought to America as a child, he was educated at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) alongside Philip Freneau and James Madison, served as a chaplain during the Revolutionary War, and eventually settled in Pittsburgh, where he practiced law and helped found the Pittsburgh Gazette.

Modern Chivalry follows the adventures of Captain Farrago — a reasonable, educated gentleman — and his servant Teague O’Regan — an ignorant Irish immigrant — through the social and political landscape of the early republic. The novel’s central satirical target is the democratic tendency to elevate the ignorant and the unqualified to positions of public trust — a tendency that Brackenridge observed with alarm in the aftermath of the Revolution.

Brackenridge is significant for TLA as a figure who grasped, earlier than most of his contemporaries, that democracy requires moral and intellectual formation in its citizens — that the republican experiment depends on a quality of character that political institutions alone cannot produce.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Modern Chivalry — 1792–1815 — novel in installments
• Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania — 1795
• Law Miscellanies — 1814