as any poem would come in 1765 to imagining something like the American Revolution. Nor should this surprise us, for embedded in its narrative of corruption and satire is the same moral logic of independence that would lead colonial pamphleteers to argue that the only hope for the preservation of public virtue would be for the colonies to cut themselves off from the corrupt British Empire before it reached a point of inevitable collapse.33 Despite their formal differences, both major strains of anti–Stamp Act verse—the carrier’s address and the high-Augustan satire of the times—appealed to this logic through a shared set of assumptions about the role of poetry as an agent in history. Whether by giving voice to a public that was coming into consciousness of itself as a political agent or by laying bare the degree to which political reality had diverged from a self-evident standard of truth or virtue, political poetry in 1765 presented itself as a means of awakening society and its leaders to otherwise unseen historical consequences.
While such strains functioned in a complementary manner in the context of the Stamp Act crisis, this would not remain the case during the Revolution. Amid the struggle between competing authoritative texts demanding implicit assent from the public—royal proclamations on one side and declarations by the Congress on the other—the two forms would come into conflict. Poets representing the so-called Patriot movement would draw more often on the populist strain of political verse to counter the commands of British generals, while Loyalist poets would be more likely to respond to acts of Congress in the impersonal voice of high Augustanism in the name of restoring order to a world turned upside down. Yet both types of response would arise from a shared sense of poetry as a unique mode of political intervention, which originated, in turn, from poetry’s capacity to highlight, reinterpret, and circumscribe the language of politics.
Tit for Tat: Songs and Poems on the Townshend Duties
If the repeal of the Stamp Act was met with poems of celebration and thanksgiving in the North American colonies, in Britain, not surprisingly, the literary response was decidedly more skeptical. Though some London newspapers published poetry expressing sympathy for the colonial protesters, and even reprinted a few anti–Stamp Act songs in their pages, most British poets responded to the resistance as a dishonest attempt by colonial subjects to avoid contributing to their own protection. In the wake of the act’s repeal, moreover, British balladeers cast the episode as a case of provincials having engineered a bargain for themselves more favorable than that of their British countrymen. Thus, in a song whose title describes the repeal as a zero-sum game—“America Triumphant; or Old England’s Downfall”—the singer introduces a motif that will reappear in countless British and Tory poems, that the leaders of the resistance are fundamentally dishonest: “The Americans no burthens bear, / But, laughing in their sleeves, / Most wittily have shewn us, / They’re still a land of thieves.”34
After the Stamp Act crisis gave way to the controversy over the Townshend duties, American Whigs were increasingly vulnerable to such attacks as this because, unlike the Stamp Act’s tax on printed materials, which could be framed as an assault on the protections of liberty, the new taxes on glass, tea, and other imports did not easily lend themselves to such an interpretation. Yet even in the absence of this connection, there was sufficient momentum for representing what was on its face an economic issue as a political and ideological one. In the first place, the Commissioners of Customs Act called for the appointment of new salaried officers who answered not to the people of the colonies but to Parliament, what the author of Oppression had called the “pension’d servile herd.” This raised questions, in turn, of whence, precisely, Parliament derived its authority to tax and whether such duties violated the constitution’s protection against depriving subjects of liberty or property without their consent—what would before long be rendered in shorthand as “taxation without representation.” The latter argument was put forth by John Dickinson in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which interpreted the new duties as an infringement of constitutional rights but did so somewhat delicately, rejecting the passionate rhetoric of the Stamp Act protests in favor of advocating what he called “constitutional methods of seeking Redress” (such as nonimportation agreements). Yet even as the Letters opted not to speak to the general sense of resentment over the Townshend Acts, Dickinson himself soon offset this gesture of rhetorical restraint by penning his other celebrated work from the period, “The Liberty Song.”35
The circumstances behind the song’s composition are well known, but they are worth recounting because they again illustrate the degree to which the imperial Crisis was experienced as a conflict between competing authoritative texts: in February 1768, the Massachusetts House of Representatives published its Circular Letter to the legislatures of the other colonies, calling for intercolonial cooperation in determining their response to the duties. The Circular Letter reaffirmed Dickinson’s argument in the Letters from a Farmer, stating, “It is an essential, unalterable right in nature, engrafted into the British constitution, as a fundamental law, … that what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken away from him without his consent.” The argument itself did not strike as much of a nerve among Lord Hillsborough’s newly created “colonial department” as the possibility of another round of protests spreading from colony to colony. Accordingly, Hillsborough issued an order to Governor Francis Bernard: force the House to rescind the Circular Letter or dissolve the body altogether. On June 30, the House refused to rescind by a vote of ninety-two to seventeen—a tally that would itself become a symbol of the liberty movement, as countless newspaper articles, broadsides, songs, and poems would praise the courage of the “Massachusetts Ninety-Two”—and the following day, the governor dissolved the assembly. Not long after, James Otis received a letter from Dickinson enclosing a “song for American freedom,” which soon appeared as a broadside under the title “A New Song, to the Tune of Hearts of Oak,” but which soon came to be known as “The Liberty Song.”36
“The Liberty Song” has been described as an eighteenth-century precursor to a modern hit song, reprinted in newspapers and broadsides throughout North America and sung at Liberty Tree ceremonies and gatherings of political organizations. It even generated its status as a subgenre, spawning numerous imitations of its form and themes. The song’s political power arose in part from the power of drinking songs in general—allowing the participants, as Kenneth Silverman put it, “to experience directly the strength in unity.” At a time of political controversy, this capacity to be publicly and unisonally voiced was crucial, for it took the already emergent sense of the poem as an embodiment of the vox populi to another level entirely in the form of a rousing chorus of voices vowing to defend their collective liberty. Newspaper accounts from 1768 confirm precisely this function, describing political gatherings rich in dramatic and symbolic significance, which culminated in the singing of what was nearly always referred to as the “celebrated” “Liberty Song.”37
Beyond the symbolism of the performance, Dickinson’s choice of the tune contributed to the spirit of unified resistance: William Boyce’s “Heart of Oak,” which was written in commemoration of several key naval battles in the Seven Years’ War (and which remains today the official song of the Royal Navy). Even the martial imagery and defiant tone of the original lyrics—with recurring phrases, such as “We’ll fight and we’ll conquer” and “Britannia triumphant”—were easily transposed into a new political context in Dickinson’s version:
COME join hand in hand, brave AMERICANS all,
And rouse your bold hearts at fair LIBERTY’s call;
No tyrannous Acts, shall suppress your just Claim,
Or stain with Dishonor AMERICA’s name.
In FREEDOM we’re BORN, and in FREEDOM we’ll LIVE;
Our Purses are ready,
Steady, Friends, steady,
Not as SLAVES
