Poetry Wars. Colin Wells
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the context of the unease colonials felt about their chances in a long war against a superior army, such a passage is significant not merely for its satiric reversal—in this case, giving the lie to the Regulars’ slogan that they “ne’er run away”—but because it advances the potentially powerful counternarrative that it was possible to destabilize the celebrated discipline of the King’s Own Regulars with guerrilla tactics, such as fighting “behind trees.” This latter point is emphasized repeatedly in the song, in particular in the final stanzas recounting the success of the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. In the context of the ongoing war, this served as a rationale for imagining future Patriot victories: “Of their firing from behind fences he makes a great pother, / Every fence has two sides; they made use of one, and we only forgot to use the other; / … / … / As they could not get before us, how could they look us in the face? / We took care they shouldn’t, by scampering away apace.”23
The same strategy of deflecting or playing on the respective forces’ reputations extended to a curious subgenre of ballads that parodied the conventional ballads that solemnly narrated various decisive battles and memorialized fallen heroes.24 This is a form that is best described as a commemoration of a comic pseudo-battle in which soldiers are described as “contending” against unexpected but wholly unthreatening circumstances, which end up exposing them as fools or cowards. The most famous Patriot example of this type of ballad is Francis Hopkinson’s “Battle of the Kegs,” which tells the true story of an unsuccessful attempt by the fledgling American Navy to inflict damage on British ships in Philadelphia by floating kegs of gunpowder down the Delaware River. Among of the best remembered of all Revolutionary War satires, “The Battle of the Kegs” exemplifies the relationship between actual and literary warfare in that it arose out of Hopkinson’s primary function in the war as chairman of the Continental Navy Board. Among his duties was to oversee an experimental operation to use David Bushnell’s recent invention of floating mines to attack the British fleet. In December 1776, a letter, likely written by Hopkinson, was sent from the navy board to George Washington, informing him that the development of the new weapon was proceeding “with Secrecy and Dispatch” and that they expected to “try the important Experiment” within days. To Hopkinson’s disappointment, the floating mines did little damage to the British fleet, but they did cause the British soldiers to panic and open fire on the kegs, apparently believing them to be manned by rebels. When Hopkinson was informed of this reaction, he immediately turned the episode into an opportunity for disseminating anti-British propaganda: according to his biographer, Hopkinson was most likely the author of an account of the event in the New Jersey Gazette that shifted the focus of the story from the failure of the experiment to its success at frightening and humiliating the troops. Not to let the story die there, Hopkinson then composed the ballad and published it in the Pennsylvania Packet some weeks later.25
Whether the episode actually led to the citywide commotion described in the song, it allowed for a portrayal of the British soldiers and sailors—from General Howe and Sir William Erskine down to the common rank and file—as superstitious, gullible, and anxious. Beginning with an ironic allusion to the literary tradition of commemorating famous battles—“’Twas early day, as poets say, / Just as the Sun was rising”—the song recounts the initial responses of a British soldier and sailor seeing the floating kegs and immediately concluding that “some mischief’s brewing.” This expectation exemplifies a broader representation of the British forces as perpetually nervous about what the rebels might be up to. Fearing that “These kegs now hold the rebels bold, / … / And they’re come down t’attack the town,” the soldiers spread the word until it reaches Quartermaster General William Erskine, who despite his superior rank, exhibits the same irrational fears:
Arise! arise! Sir Erskine cries:
The rebels—more’s the pity—
Without a boat, are all afloat,
And rang’d before the city.
The motley crew, in vessels new,
With Satan for their guide, sir,
Pack’d up in bags, and wooden KEGS,
Come driving down the tide, sir.
“Therefore prepare for bloody war;
These KEGS must all be routed,
Or sorely we despis’d shall be;
And British courage doubted.”26
This theme of British anxiety over the possibility that their valor may be doubted runs throughout the song, concluding in an expression of mock admiration for their courage. Despite the fact that their superior firepower succeeding only in destroying a few barrels, the speaker praises their ability to “conquer” the “rebel” attack: “The KEGS, ’tis said, tho’ strongly made / Of rebel staves and hoops, sir, / Could not oppose their pow’rful foes, / The conqu’ring British troops, sir.” Besides lampooning the soldiers’ overreaction, these lines highlight the fact that the rebels themselves scarcely appear in the song at all, and to the extent that they do, they figure chiefly as a measure of Britain’s dwindling military prowess. The same point is reinforced in the song’s final lines, as the speaker ironically suggests that future poets will scarcely be able to do justice to such a battle: “An hundred men, with each a pen, / Or more, upon my word, sir, / It is most true, would be too few, / Their valour to record, sir. / Such feats did they perform that day / Against the wicked KEGS, Sir, / That years to come, if they get home, / They’ll make their boasts and brags, sir.”27 The allusion here to Prince Harry’s rousing “We Happy Few” speech from Henry V, juxtaposed with the overall bathos of the song’s form and subject matter, reveals British imperial power as a parody of its former glory.
The closest British or Loyalist counterpart to “The Battle of the Kegs” is John André’s 1780 ballad “The Cow-Chace,” which performs a similar act of turning a botched attack against a Loyalist-held blockhouse in New Jersey into an occasion for satirizing the rebel soldiers as low-born, drunken, and cowardly. The skirmish, which proved costly to General Anthony Wayne’s Pennsylvania brigades, was widely reported in the newspapers, several of which noted that though the troops failed in their primary mission, they at least managed to drive away “several hundred head … of horses, horned cattle, sheep and hogs, which the banditti that infest that neighborhood had plundered from the inhabitants.” André, who was serving nearby in New York, seized on the latter incident and transformed it into a three-canto farce, culminating in a comic, frenzied retreat of men and cows and sheep. Though not a direct retort to Hopkinson’s ballad, it implicitly responds to “The Battle of the Kegs” by similarly announcing itself as a burlesque of the serious ballad form—in this case, through its sustained allusion to the fifteenth-century English classic “Chevy-Chace,” which told the story of a hunting party that unexpectedly found itself in a bloody battle. In André’s version, the sequence is reversed, as a would-be battle degenerates into a cattle raid, which, the speaker insists, will live on in the memory of the various livestock involved:
To drive the kine one summer’s morn,
The TANNER took his way;
The Calf shall rue that is unborn,
The jumbling of that day.
And Wayne descending Steers shall know,
And tauntingly deride;
And call to mind in ev’ry low,
The tanning of his hide.28
The song has been described as shifting uneasily between coarse vulgarity on the one hand and ironic elevation on the other. The overarching use of the serious ballad form and regular allusions to classical mythology and Roman history tend toward the high-burlesque tradition of the mock heroic. At the same, André exhibits a fascination with the diction and imagery of low burlesque, as in the speaker’s appellation above for General Wayne—“The TANNER,” in reference to his father’s bovine-related occupation—and his description of Wayne as “driv[ing] the kine”—a phrase that renders the feat all the meaner through its use of the Anglo-Saxon archaism. Such generic instability