Poetry
M'Fingal
John Trumbull · 1782
Opening lines
When Yankies, ſkill'd in martial rule,
Firſt put the Britiſh troops to ſchool;
Inſtructed them in warlike trade,
And new manœuvres of parade;
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
In a New England town, a squire whose ancestors came from the Highlands, and who prides himself on having the gift of second sight, addresses his fellow citizens assembled to defend the crown against the rebels. The Whig Honorius answers him point by point, and the meeting descends into uproar. A committee of the crowd then tries him, coats him in tar and feathers and ties him to the liberty pole. When night falls, in his cellar where the local loyalists gather, he tells them of a vision in which a hanged friend appeared to him.
Context
The first canto, devoted to the town meeting, was printed in Philadelphia by William and Thomas Bradford under the date 1775. After the war, the author split this canto in two and added two others, the scene of the mast and the vision; the whole, in four cantos, appeared in Hartford from Hudson and Goodwin in 1782. The model is the Hudibras of an English satirist of the seventeenth century, from which the poem borrows its burlesque contrasts and learned allusions.
Who it is for
Four cantos in short lines rhymed in couplets, full of allusions to the men and events of 1775. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
Widely read during the Revolution, it went through some thirty editions, most of them pirated, and in 1917 was considered the only work of the Hartford group still read.
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