May our club flourish happy, united, and free;
And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s Vine.”
The last two lines of each stanza were repeated in chorus. In this country, “To Anacreon in Heaven” was first adapted to a song written for the Adams campaign by Robert Treat Paine. It was entitled “Adams and Liberty,” and was first sung at the anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society in 1798.
After the rout at Bladensburg and the capture of Washington by the British forces, the invaders, under General Ross and Admiral Cockburn, proceeded up the Chesapeake to attack Baltimore. Its brave and heroic defenders were reinforced by volunteers from neighboring sections. Among the recruits from Pennsylvania who hastened to offer their services was a company from Dauphin County under the command of Captain Thomas Walker. When Francis Scott Key, while detained as a prisoner on the cartel ship in the Patapsco, saw “by the dawn’s early light” that “our flag was still there,” he was inspired to write his splendid verses, and on his release and return to Baltimore, one of the mess of Captain Walker’s company, who had been fortunate enough to obtain a rude copy, was so impressed with its inspiriting vigor that he read it aloud to his comrades three times. Its effect was electric, and at once the suggestion was made that a suitable air be found to which it could be sung. A young man named George J. Heisely, then from Harrisburg, though he had formerly lived in Frederick, and was well acquainted with Mr. Key, was so devoted to music that he always carried his flute and his note-book with him. Taking them out, he laid his flute on a camp barrel, and turned over the leaves of his note-book until he came to Anacreon in Heaven, when he was immediately struck with the adaptability of its measure. A strolling actor, a member of the company from Lancaster, named Ferdinand Durang, snatched the flute, and played the air, while Heisely held up the note-book. On the following evening Durang sang the Star-Spangled Banner for the first time on the stage of the Holliday Street Theatre.
The Red, White, and Blue
It is stated that “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” or the “Red, White, and Blue,” was written and composed in 1843 by David T. Shaw, a concert singer at the Chinese Museum, Philadelphia. The statement is also made that the authorship of the words and music was traced to Thomas A. Becket, an English actor then playing at the Chestnut Street Theatre. Whether the words were written by Shaw or for him, it is clear that the Columbia, Gem of the Ocean of Shaw is a “dodged” version of the English original “Britannia, the Pride of the Ocean,” which Shaw had the credit of writing. An English commentator says that “the word Britannia fits the metre, whereas Columbia is a lumbering word which cannot be pronounced in less than four syllables; that while an island may properly be styled a ‘gem of the ocean,’ the phrase would have been absurd when applied to the United States of that day, and is even more incorrect now when the vast mass of land comprised in its territory is only partly surrounded by three oceans; and there are two Columbias, the South American Columbia and British Columbia. The United States of America was never known by such a title.”
Yankee Doodle
American philologists have endeavored to trace the term Yankee to an Indian source. It is not Indian, however, but Dutch. If one might characterize the relations between New England and the New Netherlands in the early colonial period, he would say with Irving that “the Yankee despised the Dutchman and the Dutchman abominated the Yankee.” The Dutch verb “Yankee” means to snarl, wrangle, and the noun “Yanker,” howling cur, is perhaps the most expressive term of contempt in the whole language. Out of that acrimonious struggle between Connecticut and New Amsterdam came the nickname which has stuck to the descendants of the Puritans ever since.
The adoption of the air of Yankee Doodle has been credited to Dr. Shackburg, a wit, musician, and surgeon, in 1755, when the colonial troops united with the British regulars in the attack on the French outposts at Niagara and Frontenac. It was aimed in derision of the motley clothes, the antiquated equipments, and the lack of military training of the militia from the Eastern provinces, all in broad contrast with the neat and orderly appointments of the regulars. Be this as it may, the tune was well known in the time of Charles II., under the name “Lydia Fisher’s Jig.” Aside from the old doggerel verses, commencing “Father and I went down to camp,” there is no song; the tune in the United States is a march. It was well known in Holland, and was in common use there as a harvest-song among farm-laborers, at a remote period.