SONGS AND BALLADS OF THE COLONIAL AND

REVOLUTIONARY PERIODS

The most spontaneous and original poetry of a period is that which bursts from a people under strain, when everything is forgotten save the emotions deeply stirred. Such expressions are always lyric,-songs, rallying cries, ballads. The border wars with the Indians furnished an abundance of ballad material, but in that strenuous era there were few balladists, or, what doubtless is more accurate, few channels through which ballads might come down to our own day. Large numbers of ballads of colonial days were issued as broadsides, and numbers of them have disappeared as daily papers disappear to-day. Crude as it is, the "Lovewell's Fight" ballad has survived as the best specimen of its period.

The warfare waged by the hardy New Englanders upon the monsters of the ocean produced the most realistic and spirited song of pre-Revolutionary America, the "Whaling Song" by John Osborn of Cape Cod, a song declared by Griswold to have been "well known in the Pacific for more than half a century."

The French and Indian campaigns, like all other wars, had their songs which were sung by the soldiers about the camp-fires or on the march. The best is the "Soldier Song" which tradition has attributed to General Wolfe who fell at Quebec, a song which became a great favorite certainly with the British soldiers during the revolution. The unfortunate Major André often rendered it most effectively. The great epic struggle for freedom furnished an astonishing abundance of songs and ballads. Several volumes of them gathered from newspapers and broadsides have been issued and there is material for volumes more. Some of these intensely patriotic lyrics came long before the final struggle, like Dickinson's "The Liberty Song," seemingly an attempt to create even at that early epoch an American national anthem. Later, when war had become a certainty, there were stirring calls to arms, and still later there sprang up a plenteous crop of ballads covering every episode of the struggle. The greater number of them are the veriest doggerel, yet all of them are important, they are genuine expressions of emotion and of patriotism, and they show the heart of America during "the days that tried men's souls." Undoubtedly the best ballad that came from the struggle was the anonymous "Nathan Hale." The loyalist balladry, too, must not be forgotten. The loyalists were the patriots and the conservative element of their day: they stood by the established government and refused to be disloyal to the King whom they had served all their lives. Their songs and ballads are full of denunciation of the "rebels" and the "rabble" that were defying the King's regulars. The Revolution was a civil war as well as a war against an overseas power, and it divided communities and even families. The poetry of this phase of the struggle had not many outlets in the newspapers of America, but the specimens which have survived are full of genuine feeling, and moreover they are as characteristically American in spirit as even the poetic products of the "rabble" they re

viled.