Immortal Songs of Camp and Field

He was a very precocious and brilliant youth. When he was seven years of age his family removed from Taunton, where he was born, to Boston, and there he prepared for Harvard College at one of the public schools, entering the freshman class in his fifteenth year. One of his classmates wrote a squib on him in verse on the college wall, and Paine, on consultation with his friends, being advised to retaliate in kind, did so, and thus became aware of the poetic faculty of which he afterward made such liberal use. He wrote nearly all his college compositions in verse, with such success that he was assigned the post of poet at the College Exhibition in the autumn of 1791, and at the Commencement in the following year. After receiving his diploma, he entered the counting-room of Mr. James Tisdale, but soon proved that his tastes did not lie in that direction. He would often be carried away by day-dreams and make entries in his day-book in poetry. On one occasion when he was sent to the bank with a check for five hundred dollars, he met some literary acquaintances on the way and went off with them to Cambridge, and spent a week in the enjoyment of “the feast of reason and the flow of soul,” returning to his duties with the cash at the end of that period.

In 1792 young Paine fell deeply in love with an actress, a Miss Baker, aged sixteen, who was one of the first players to appear in Boston. Their performances were at first called dramatic recitations to avoid a collision with a law forbidding “stage plays.” He married Miss Baker in 1794, and was promptly turned out of doors by his father.

The next year, on taking his degree of A.M. at Cambridge, he delivered a poem entitled The Invention of Letters. There was a great deal of excitement over this poem at the time, as it contained some lines referring to Jacobinism, which the college authorities crossed out, but which he delivered as written. The poem was greatly admired, and Washington wrote him a letter in appreciation of its merits. It was immediately published and large editions sold, the author receiving fifteen hundred dollars as his share of the profits, which was no doubt a very grateful return to a poet with a young wife and an obdurate father. The breach with his family, however, was afterward healed.

Mr. Paine was also the author of a poem entitled The Ruling Passion, for which he received twelve hundred dollars. Still another famous poem of his was called The Steeds of Apollo.

In 1794 he produced his earliest ode, Rise, Columbia, which, perhaps, was the seed thought from which later sprang the more extended hymn, —

“When first the sun o’er ocean glow’d
And earth unveil’d her virgin breast,
Supreme ’mid Nature’s vast abode
Was heard th’ Almighty’s dread behest:
‘Rise, Columbia, brave and free,
Poise the globe, and bound the sea.’”

His most famous song, Adams and Liberty, – which is sung to the same tune as Key’s Star-Spangled Banner, or Anacreon in Heaven, – was written four years later at the request of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. Its sale yielded him a profit of more than seven hundred and fifty dollars. These receipts show an immediate popularity which has seldom been achieved by patriotic songs. In 1799 he delivered an oration on the first anniversary of the dissolution of the alliance with France which was a great oratorical triumph. The author sent a copy, after its publication, to Washington, and received a reply in which the General says: “You will be assured that I am never more gratified than when I see the effusions of genius from some of the rising generation, which promises to secure our national rank in the literary world; as I trust their firm, manly, and patriotic conduct will ever maintain it with dignity in the political.”

The next to the last stanza of Adams and Liberty was not in the song as originally written. Paine was dining with Major Benjamin Russell, when he was reminded that his song had made no mention of Washington. The host said he could not fill his glass until the error had been corrected, whereupon the author, after a moment’s thinking, scratched off the lines which pay such a graceful tribute to the First American: —

“Should the tempest of war overshadow our land,
Its bolts could ne’er rend Freedom’s temple asunder;
For, unmov’d, at its portal would Washington stand,
And repulse with his breast the assaults of the thunder!
His sword from the sleep
Of its scabbard would leap,
And conduct, with its point, every flash to the deep;
For ne’er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves,
While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its waves.”

Instead of being added to the hymn it was inserted as it here appears. The second, fourth, and fifth stanzas have been usually omitted in recent publications of the hymn.

The brilliant genius of Paine was sadly eclipsed by strong drink, that dire foe of many men of bright literary promise. His sun, which had risen so proudly, found an untimely setting about the beginning of the war of 1812.

YANKEE DOODLE

Father and I went down to camp
Along with Captain Gooding,
And there we saw the men and boys,
As thick as hasty pudding.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle Dandy!
Mind the music and the step,
And with the gals be handy!

And there we see a thousand men
As rich as Squire David,
And what they wasted every day, —
I wish it had been savèd.

The ’lasses they eat up every day
Would keep our house all winter, —
They have so much that I’ll be bound
They eat whene’er they’ve a mind to.

And there we see a whopping gun,
As big as a log of maple,
Mounted on a little cart, —
A load for father’s cattle.

And every time they fired it off
It took a horn of powder,
And made a noise like father’s gun,
Only a nation louder.

I went as near to it
As ’Siah’s underpinning;
Father went as nigh agin, —
I thought the devil was in him.

Cousin Simon grew so bold,
I thought he meant to cock it;
He scared me so, I streaked it off,
And hung to father’s pocket.

And Captain Davis had a gun
He kind o’ clapped his hand on,
And stuck a crooked stabbing-iron
Upon the little end on ’t.

And there I saw a pumpkin shell
As big as mother’s basin;
And every time they sent one off,
They scampered like tarnation.

I saw a little bar’el, too,
Its heads were made of leather;
They knocked on it with little plugs,
To call the folks together.

And there was Captain Washington,
With grand folks all about him;
They says he’s grown so tarnal proud,
He cannot ride without them.

He had on his meeting-clothes,
And rode a slapping stallion,
And gave his orders to the men, —
I guess there was a million.