“The Liberty Song” has been described as an eighteenth-century precursor to a modern hit song, reprinted in newspapers and broadsides throughout North America and sung at Liberty Tree ceremonies and gatherings of political organizations. It even generated its status as a subgenre, spawning numerous imitations of its form and themes. The song’s political power arose in part from the power of drinking songs in general—allowing the participants, as Kenneth Silverman put it, “to experience directly the strength in unity.” At a time of political controversy, this capacity to be publicly and unisonally voiced was crucial, for it took the already emergent sense of the poem as an embodiment of the vox populi to another level entirely in the form of a rousing chorus of voices vowing to defend their collective liberty. Newspaper accounts from 1768 confirm precisely this function, describing political gatherings rich in dramatic and symbolic significance, which culminated in the singing of what was nearly always referred to as the “celebrated” “Liberty Song.”37
Beyond the symbolism of the performance, Dickinson’s choice of the tune contributed to the spirit of unified resistance: William Boyce’s “Heart of Oak,” which was written in commemoration of several key naval battles in the Seven Years’ War (and which remains today the official song of the Royal Navy). Even the martial imagery and defiant tone of the original lyrics—with recurring phrases, such as “We’ll fight and we’ll conquer” and “Britannia triumphant”—were easily transposed into a new political context in Dickinson’s version:
COME join hand in hand, brave AMERICANS all,
And rouse your bold hearts at fair LIBERTY’s call;
No tyrannous Acts, shall suppress your just Claim,
Or stain with Dishonor AMERICA’s name.
In FREEDOM we’re BORN, and in FREEDOM we’ll LIVE;
Our Purses are ready,
Steady, Friends, steady,
Not as SLAVES but as FREEMEN our money we’ll give.38
Like other American responses to the Townshend Acts, “The Liberty Song” couches the act of protesting the taxes in the common discourse of Whig ideology, representing colonial resistance as a defense against tyranny and thus, paradoxically, a “support of our laws.” At the same time, in contrast to much anti–Townshend Act literature, which treated the issue of taxation indirectly (by way of abstract or legal language, such as “injustice” or “arbitrary laws”), Dickinson does not shy away from the economic dimension of the controversy, directly referencing “Purses,” “Money,” and the right of property in the refrain, and openly praising America’s colonial forefathers for pursuing their own economic self-interest so that their “Children can gather the Fruits of [their] Pain.” By this same logic, the song goes on to say, to give up one’s profits to tax collectors is tantamount to surrendering one’s birthright: “Their generous Bosoms all Dangers despis’d, / So highly, so wisely, their BIRTHRIGHTS they priz’d; / We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep, / Nor frustrate their Toils on the Land or the Deep.”39
While the success of the song may attest to Dickinson’s skill in drawing the economic issues of the Townshend Acts into the broader ideology of liberty, this same tactic would leave the song vulnerable to a satiric counterattack charging that the discourse of liberty, when applied to the Townshend duties, amounted to merely a pretense for individual self-interest. This is the satiric point of “A Parody of a Well-Known Liberty Song,” which appeared a few weeks later, recasting those whom Dickinson deemed brave defenders of liberty as an enraged mob of scoundrels who stand for nothing but a willingness to take what they can from their moral and social betters:
Come shake your dull Noddles, ye Pumpkins and bawl,
And own that you’re mad at fair Liberty’s Call;
No scandalous Conduct can add to your Shame,
Condemn’d to Dishonor. Inherit the Fame —
In Folly you’re born, and in Folly you’ll live,
To Madness still ready,
And Stupidly steady,
Not as Men, but as Monkies [sic], the Tokens you give.
The sheer number of distinct attacks, both in this passage and throughout the “Parody,” is staggering: the Sons of Liberty are lowly, envious, mad, and unscrupulous; in the verses to follow, they are described as “vile Rascalls” willing to steal whatever “Chattels and Goods” they can get their hands on, and as knaves who justify such theft by railing against the “insolent Rich.” Though the determination by the leaders of the resistance is, on the one hand, dismissed as a sort of ideological stupor (as in the phrase “Stupidly steady”), more often it is unmasked as a sham, an excuse for “Reaping what other men sow.”40 It is this latter critique that will prove particularly significant not only within the “Liberty Song” exchange but also within the larger history of literary warfare in the Revolution and after. The charge that the Sons of Liberty amounted to a pack of thieves directly countered the main argument of Dickinson’s original “Liberty Song,” that the new taxes themselves amounted to a form of theft. Thus did the dynamic of this exchange anticipate one of the crucial conventions of political verse more broadly—to transform or negate the ideological content of an opposing work of political verse by circumscribing it within a new ideological narrative.
Beyond the arguments advanced, moreover, the “Parody” accomplishes its counterdiscursive strategy through its form, as a rival song. For notwithstanding its title, the song is not strictly a parody: it imitates the poetic and musical form of “The Liberty Song” but not its voice or speaker. Its ideological power arises from its invocation of a rival chorus—the “we” who speak back to the “you” of the mob—which calls into being an unacknowledged segment of the public that disagrees with the original song’s assertion of united resistance to the Townshend Acts. From the perspective of the “Parody,” the public invoked by “The Liberty Song” is an unrepresentative segment of the British American public, and in making this claim, the “Parody” projects a fundamentally different political meaning onto the conflict as a whole. In place of the original dynamic, which pitted “the people” against a group of corrupt ministers and placemen, the implicit dynamic of the “Parody” pits two parties against each other, thus recasting Dickinson’s own song as a representation not of widespread popular protest but of mere factional rivalry.
More remarkable still, the circumstances of the publication of the “Parody” reveal additional layers of ideological import. For the song appeared not, as one might expect, in a British or Loyalist newspaper but in the Boston Gazette, whose editors, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, would become leading advocates of the Patriot cause. In addition, the song appeared under the heading “Last Tuesday the following