The strong political bias of the time drew into its vortex most of the miscellaneous literature that was produced.  A number of ballads, serious and comic, whig and tory, dealing with the battles and other incidents of the long war, enjoyed a wide circulation in the newspapers or were hawked about in printed broadsides.  Most of these have no literary merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities.  A favorite piece on the tory side was the Cow Chase, a cleverish parody on Chevy Chase, written by the gallant and unfortunate Major Andre, at the expense of “Mad” Anthony Wayne.  The national song Yankee Doodle was evolved during the Revolution, and, as is the case with John Brown’s Body and many other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs about its origin.  The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, and applied in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of the British army as early as 1755.  Like many another nickname, the term Yankee Doodle was taken up by the nicknamed and proudly made their own.  The stanza,

  “Yankee Doodle came to town,” etc.,

antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the tune was the Yankee’s Return from Camp, which is apparently of the year 1775.  The most popular humorous ballad on the whig side was the Battle of the Kegs, founded on a laughable incident of the campaign at Philadelphia.  This was written by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian, and one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  Hopkinson has some title to rank as one of the earliest American humorists.  Without the keen wit of McFingal, some of his Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings, published in 1792, have more geniality and heartiness than Trumbull’s satire.  His Letter on Whitewashing is a bit of domestic humor that foretokens the Danbury News man; and his Modern Learning, 1784, a burlesque on college examinations, in which a salt-box is described from the point of view of metaphysics, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry, long kept its place in school-readers and other collections.  His son, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the song of Hail Columbia, which is saved from insignificance only by the music to which it was married, the then popular air of “The President’s March.”  The words were written in 1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at a time when party spirit ran high.  It was sung nightly by crowds in the streets, and for a whole season by a favorite singer at the theater; for by this time there were theaters in Philadelphia, in New York, and even in puritanic Boston.  Much better than Hail Columbia was the Star-Spangled Banner, the words of which were composed by Francis Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812.