“A
soldier stood on a log of wood,
And saw a thing surprising.
As in amaze he stood to gaze,
The truth can't be denied, sir,
He spied a score of kegs or more
Come floating down the tide,
sir.
A sailor too in jerkin blue,
This strange appearance viewing,
First damned his eyes, in great
surprise,
Then said, ‘Some mischief's
brewing.
"These kegs, I'm told, the
rebels hold,
Packed up like pickled herring;
And they're come down to attack
the town,
In this new way of ferrying.’
The soldier flew, the sailor too,
And scared almost to death, sir,
Wore out their shoes, to spread
the news,
And ran till out of breath,
sir.”— American polymath
and signer of the Declaration of Independence Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), “The
Battle of the Kegs,” originally published in 1778, reprinted in American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by David S.
Shields (2007)
Faithful
reader, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough and frequently enough,
you’ll notice that I open and close the workweek with a humorous quote, on the
reasonable supposition that everybody needs a laugh as they start their jobs on
Monday and once they make it to Friday. I find no reason to change that pattern
as we begin celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence.
If
you read anything at all about that document and the American Revolution in
general (which I hope you will), nearly all of it will be very sober. And I’ll
provide a bit of that over the weekend myself.
But
human nature doesn’t change that much over the centuries, and the men and women
who created this country liked to drink and laugh as much as we do. I think
they would have nodded in agreement with a bibulous fellow writer on my college
newspaper, when hearing a recent article described as “very sober,” remarked,
“Gee, I hate anything sober!”
So
did Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence whom I think
you and I would have liked to hang with. A blog post of mine from 18 years ago
described the general arc of the career of this witty Renaissance Man of the
Revolution, but his part in depicting one incident in the war deserves a fuller
explanation.
If
the rhythm of his verses above sounds familiar, it should: they’re written to
the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Modern Americans associate that tune with patriots
playing it on fife and drum on the way into battle, but it began a few decades
before the war, with British doctor Richard Schuckburg creating a straw man
with a colonist who was both a provincial hick and a pretentious fop.
By
the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, according to this account of the song on the Website of The Kennedy Center, the colonists were
throwing the insult back, singing the tune derisively at the fleeing redcoats.
Nearly
three years later, Hopkinson decided to make further use of the tune’s melody.
You can see from the verses I’ve quoted that the lyrics are in ballad form, as
capable of being sung as read.
What
he was doing was rather audacious: taking a failed patriot military operation
and, instead of being defensive about it, using it to mock vaunted British
heroics.
In
my high school, if you mentioned “The Battle of the Kegs,” some rowdy
classmates might have seen it as a dare to finish off libations at a party.
But
in the American Revolution, it referred to a real patriot tactic in January
1778: to float explosive barrels at British ships. The colonists needed to try
something: the British had captured and made themselves comfortable in
Philadelphia, the capital of the young republic.
The
whole thing was a big dud: no British ships blew up. But Hopkinson used the
opportunity to satirize the redcoats’ panic and overreaction to the unknown
objects coming their way.
Ultimately,
the American Revolution would have to be settled by other means. But then as
now, satire directed at an enemy possessing overwhelming power was necessary to
sustain the spirit for the larger contest.
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