in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the
newly adopted flag of the Confederation:

"Inscribed with inconsistent types
Of Liberty and thirteen stripes."

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made much
noise in their time as the "Hartford Wits." The other members of the
group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith,
Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow
had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale,
where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight.
During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at
its close they found themselves again together for a few years at
Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and
literary purposes. Their presence lent a sort of {383} _eclat_ to the
little provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an
intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New
York. The Hartford Wits were staunch Federalists, and used their pens
freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and
in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull,
Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the _New Haven Gazette_ a
series of satirical papers entitled the _Anarchiad,_ suggested by the
English _Rolliad_, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic
on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." These papers were
an effort to correct, by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things
which preceded the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It
was a time of great confusion and discontent, when, in parts of the
country, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five
years' pay by the Continental Congress to the officers of the American
army. The _Anarchiad_ was followed by the _Echo_ and the _Political
Green House_, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar
in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly
blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their
day, and are an important part of the literature of the old Federalist
party.

Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplomatic service, and
was, successively, embassador to Portugal and to Spain, whence he {384}
introduced into America the breed of merino sheep. He had been on
Washington's staff during the war, and was several times an inmat