In his own day Francis Hopkinson enjoyed a reputation substantially in excess of what history has accorded him. This fact is neither surprising nor unjust. Accomplished at music, art, politics, invention, and literature, he achieved distinction in none. Some have concluded that his talents were real but too widely spread; others have assumed that he lacked depth. It is perhaps fair to say that because he lived in exciting times he allowed himself to be pulled in many directions at once and failed to focus his abundant energies toward depth and achievement in one field. That he was a gentleman amateur in the eighteenth-century tradition, however, is not to be held against him nor allowed to diminish the respect he is owed.

Insofar as there was an establishment in Philadelphia in the first half of the eighteenth century, Hopkinson was a member of it at his birth in...