A physician, Church of England clergyman, poet, and wit, Jonathan Odell of New Jersey emerged as one of the Tories' most trenchant satirists during the American War of Independence. When on 14 June 1776 he composed an ode to the king's birthday for a group of captured English officers, he provoked a series of reactions that culminated in his fleeing to New York and eventually becoming a Loyalist refugee in the newly created province of New Brunswick in British North America (Canada).

Odell's reaction to the war was a natural result of his social and educational background. Born on 25 September 1737 in Newark, New Jersey, of Massachusetts Bay stock (the son of John and Temperance Dickinson Odell), he received his M.A. from the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where his grandfather had been the first president. After a sojourn in the West Indies as a British Army surgeon, Odell entered...