Immortal Songs of Camp and Field

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Banks Louis Albert. Immortal Songs of Camp and Field

THE AMERICAN FLAG

ADAMS AND LIBERTY

YANKEE DOODLE

THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER

HAIL COLUMBIA

COLUMBIA, THE GEM OF THE OCEAN

THE FLAG OF OUR UNION

JOHN BROWN’S BODY

DIXIE

THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

SONG OF A THOUSAND YEARS

TENTING ON THE OLD CAMP GROUND

THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC

JUST BEFORE THE BATTLE, MOTHER

WHEN THIS CRUEL WAR IS OVER

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA

MY MARYLAND

ALL QUIET ALONG THE POTOMAC

THE OLD FOLKS AT HOME

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

RULE, BRITANNIA

THE WATCH ON THE RHINE

THE MARSEILLAISE

THE BLUE BELLS OF SCOTLAND

RECESSIONAL

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The father of the author of Adams and Liberty, or as it has been more usually entitled in later days, Ye Sons of Columbia, was the Robert Treat Paine who was one of the immortal signers of the Declaration of Independence. The author of this hymn was given by his parents the name of Thomas, but on account of that being the name of a notorious infidel of his time, he appealed to the legislature of Massachusetts to give him a Christian name; thereafter he took the name of his father, Robert Treat Paine.

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.

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

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.”

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