Poetry Wars - Colin Wells Early American Studies

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and even to “ravish wife and daughter.” In another, the song abruptly shifts to using ornate Latinate diction and classical allusion, such as when Wayne is charmed by a local “HAMADRYAD,” or wood nymph, who implores “the great commander” to hear her “lamentations” over the Loyalists’ felling of a nearby grove.29

      This generic instability may be understood as a function of the dual and, at times, conflicting ideological purposes of the ballad. For while the mock-heroic elements of “The Cow-Chase” were an effective means for accomplishing one purpose—to deflate the outsized military aspirations of the colonial forces—they did little to counter the strategy we have seen in Patriot war ballads, to focus relentlessly on the failures of the British forces while sidestepping any explicit representation of their own forces. “The Cow-Chase” responds to this strategy by supplying an ample measure of concrete, personal representations of the American soldiers and calling on the diction and imagery of low burlesque to accomplish this purpose. Thus the emphasis on Wayne’s drunken soldiers becoming so overcome with fervor for battle that they end up soiling themselves, and thus the ballad’s chaotic finale, which symbolically erases the distinction between the “drums and colours” of the cavalry and the cows and sheep running alongside them. Concluding with an allusion to the final lines of Swift’s “Description of a City Shower,” André reinforces this conflation of human and animal by comparing the scene to a confluence of “kennels,” or street gutters, overflowing with waste:

      As when two kennels in the street,

      Swell’d with a recent rain,

      In gushing streams together meet,

      And seek the neighboring drain;

      So met these dung-born tribes in one,

      As swift in their career,

      And so to Newbridge they ran on,--

      But all the cows got clear.30

      Such moments serve as a reminder that underlying the ballad wars over American military readiness lay the more fundamental struggle over American identity—more specifically, how, or whether, American identity could be positively defined. Nowhere was this struggle more apparent or more complex than in the exchange between Patriot and British versions of the “Yankee Doodle” motif. For not only was “Yankee Doodle” the most famous ballad archetype of the Revolution, it was also the most contested, appearing in both Patriot and British/Loyalist guises from the outbreak of the war until nearly its end. Indeed, the contested nature of the song’s meaning is evident in the complicated and often misreported history of its origins: as J. A. Leo Lemay conclusively demonstrated decades ago, “Yankee Doodle” was not (as had long been claimed) penned by a British army doctor as a satire of colonial militiamen during the Seven Years’ War. Rather, it originated as an American folk ballad, with elements going back at least to the Battle of Cape Breton in 1745, and more likely to the “musters” and Election Day rituals of early New England. At the same time, much of the confusion over the song’s intent is understandable because, during the British occupation of the colonies in the years preceding the war, British soldiers performed the song as a means of caricaturing the colonials as backwoods yokels, unfit for military service. This simple satiric version of the motif is found in a string of British or Loyalist “Yankee Doodle” songs that appeared throughout the war, beginning with “Adam’s Fall: The Trip to Cambridge,” which takes as its subject Washington’s arrival in Massachusetts as commander in chief. The song opens by ridiculing the rising general as an ambitious upstart whose claim to leadership is owed chiefly to his wardrobe, as in several descriptions in which he is “clothed in power and breeches,” “prinked up in full-bag wig” and “in leathers tight.” More scathing still, the song presents the troops commanded by Washington as an assortment of marginal colonial figures: “The rebel clowns, oh! what a sight! / Too awkward was their figure. / ’Twas yonder stood a pious wight, / And here and there a nigger.” Versions of this low-born (and, in this case, racially inferior) caricature of Americans would serve as the basis of most later British variations of the song, which usually added stock elements like cowardice and drunkenness, such as in “Yankee Doodle’s Expedition to Rhode Island,” which commemorated the failed attempt by combined American and French forces to capture Newport in the summer of 1778. In an echo of “The Cow-Chace,” the figure of Yankee Doodle is presented as innately cowardly but capable of being temporarily made brave by drink, and thus easily rattled by the superior British forces: “So Yankee Doodle did forget / The sound of British drum, Sir, / How oft it made him quake and sweat / In spite of Yankee Rum, Sir.”31

      The social satire embedded in British and Loyalist versions of “Yankee Doodle” was so wholly identified with the song’s meaning that even prior to the war, the tune alone signified an implicit taunt against “yokel” Americans. In March 1775, the Pennsylvania Journal reported the tarring and feathering of a perceived rebel by British troops in Philadelphia; fixing a sign on his back reading “American Liberty or a Specimen of Democracy,” the troops “played ‘YANKEE DOODLE,’” the author notes, “to add to the insult.” A more famous example of the song as taunt is the account of Lord Percy’s troops playing the tune as they marched from Boston toward the Battle of Concord, where they unexpectedly met another British regiment in the midst of a retreat. Eventually they, too, were forced to flee, leading a British officer to remark that while they had begun the day playing the song in jest, by the end the Americans “made us dance till we were tired.” This account, reprinted in several newspapers and memorialized in Trumbull’s M’Fingal, transformed the song into a symbol of the colonial forces’ capacity to pull off unexpected victories against their putative superiors. For the remainder of the war, the tune became a staple for American fifers on occasions of British surrender, including at Saratoga and Yorktown.32

      At the same time, the act of reclaiming “Yankee Doodle” as an American military theme signified more than simply a jab at the British for losing battles to supposedly inferior soldiers; it was part of a larger and more complex strategy of satiric reversal that had always been central to the meaning of the American versions of the song. Indeed, among the implications of Lemay’s painstaking assembly of internal and external evidence that “Yankee Doodle” originated in colonial New England in the 1740s is that it also demonstrated that the song’s primary satiric point had always been “to reply to English snobbery by deliberately posturing as unbelievably ignorant yokels.” That is, the American versions of “Yankee Doodle” enacted a parody of the metropolitan caricature projected onto colonial Americans. This is seen in the earliest versions of the song, which identified the New England soldiers at Cape Breton by ludicrous biblical names such as “Brother Ephraim” and “Aminadab.” And it is also central to the meaning of the “Visit to Camp” versions of the song that first appeared in the early days of the war, the point of which was to subvert the conventional social and intellectual hierarchy by allowing American provincials to ridicule the gaze of their ostensible betters as condescending and ignorant.

      In the context of the question of military readiness, moreover, the Revolutionary-themed “Visit to Camp” stanzas—as most clearly illustrated in the 1775 broadside “The Yankey’s Return from Camp”—subtly pushed back against the belief that the colonials were unfit to face their British opponents in battle. At the surface level, the song plays into the Yankee Doodle stereotype by depicting a young boy’s bewilderment as he observes the activities of a military camp presided over by General Washington. The boy exhibits all of the traits of ignorance and cowardice that had been projected onto the American soldiers more generally, such as when he mistakes a cannon for “a swamping gun, / Large as a log of maple,” or when he runs home to his “mother’s chamber” after being tricked into believing that the trenches the soldiers are digging are actually “graves.” Yet at a deeper level the boy performs the caricature against a description of a considerable military operation: among the sights he misinterprets is that of “Captain Washington,” dressed in a fine uniform, with “gentlefolk around him.” For the boy, this suggests that the American commander has “grown so ’tarnal proud,” but for the song’s implied audience, it signifies a more encouraging possibility, that Washington, leading what appears to be a massive army, is hardly distinguishable from a British general:

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