The most popular poem of the Revolutionary period was John Trumbull’s McFingal, published in part at Philadelphia in 1775, and incomplete shape at Hartford in 1782.  It went through more than thirty editions in America, and was several times reprinted in England. McFingal was a satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyalists, and modeled quite closely upon Butler’s mock heroic poem, Hudibras.  As Butler’s hero sallies forth to put down May games and bear-baitings, so the tory McFingal goes out against the liberty-poles and bonfires of the patriots, but is tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated, and finally takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston.  The poem is written with smartness and vivacity, attains often to drollery and sometimes to genuine humor.  It remains one of the best of American political satires, and unquestionably the most successful of the many imitations of Hudibras, whose manner it follows so closely that some of its lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are generally attributed to Butler.  For example: 

  “No man e’er felt the halter draw
  With good opinion of the law.”

Or this: 

  “For any man with half an eye
  What stands before him may espy;
  But optics sharp it needs, I ween,
  To see what is not to be seen.”

Trumbull’s wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slavery in the couplet about the newly adopted flag of the Confederation: 

  “Inscribed with inconsistent types
  Of Liberty and thirteen stripes.”

Trumbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who made such noise in their time as the “Hartford Wits.”  The other members of the group were Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight, and Richard Alsop.  Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership at Yale, where they were contemporaries of each other and of Timothy Dwight.  During the war they served in the army in various capacities, and at its close they found themselves again together for a few years at Hartford, where they formed a club that met weekly for social and literary purposes.  Their presence lent a sort of eclat to the little provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Philadelphia or New York.  The Hartford Wits were stanch Federalists, and used their pens freely in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and in ridicule of Jefferson and the Democrats.  In 1786-87 Trumbull, Hopkins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the New Haven Gazette a series of satirical papers entitled the Anarchiad, suggested by the English Rolliad, and purporting to be extracts from an ancient epic on “the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night.”  The papers were an effort to correct,