appearance of his, and as Maine’s most famous
minstrel, Shaw had, for his last broadside ballad,
a suitable subject, and incidentally a subject that
under the circumstances could not help but sell.
If Shaw’s ballads were in any way unique—
the peculiar and solitary creation of an eccentric—
their intrinsic value would be so slight that we
could happily ignore them. But Shaw’s poetic
hack-work was not a single phenomenon. It was
symptomatic of the popularity of the ballad form
in the early United States, and although the ballad
at this level is not high poetry, it reveals the exis-
tence of an audience ready to pay for the right
kind of poetry. By tapping this ballad audience a
few years later, such a poet as Longfellow was able
to earn a comfortable living. In the earlier period,
with which we are concerned, Shaw’s ballads sup-
plemented the press and catered, on a popular
level, to the taste that demanded in literature the
gothic thrills of violence, and the religious sop of
moralizing.
Apart from its lugubrious appeal to the thrill
seekers, the ballad was also employed as a means
of propaganda or satire. Shaw himself made use
of this satiric power of the ballad when he
attacked church music, but more violent exam-
ples of this kind of broadside verse can be found
in Portland proper. About 1812 the Reverend
Edward Payson had organized a group ‘‘for the
suppression of vice and immorality.’’ Its first
action was to enforce dead-letter laws concerning
theSabbath:noboywasallowedonthestreet
except on the way to service, and all barber
shops and drinking places were closed. When the
group turned more and more to temperance work,
feeling in the town ran high. The ‘‘Tythingmen’’ of
Mr. Payson were sixty-nine in number and soon
were dubbed the ‘‘Sixty-Nine Society.’’ Anti-Sixty-
Nine leagues were formed, processions held, and
ballads written. Rumor attributed some of the
latter to Nathaniel Deering, and in places they
seem to bear the stamp of his wit. The first ballad
attack was against the closing of the barber shops:
Ye Tythingmen of Portland,
Ye pious Sixty-nine,
Ah, why compel th’inhabitants
To look like dirty swine!
With rumpled wig, like guinea pig,
Our whiskers out of trim,
O! we go
Thro’ the snow
To the Old Jerusalem [1st Parish Church]
Uncomb’d, unpowder’d and uncurl’d
To the Old Jerusalem.This was followed by a ballad discussion
of the hypocrisy of the Sixty-Niners when it
came to matters of liquor. They were quoted
as saying,
Thus the bottle we’ll visit at noon in a trice
And only just call it ‘‘Suppression of Vice,’’
Then drive out the tipplers tho’ dry as a pine,
To yield to the pious, the brave Sixty-Nine.
Derry Down.
Finally the ballad counterattack descended to
the level of personal abuse not worth the quoting.
These ballads were written to popular tunes and
were sung in torchlight parades. In 1815 the anti-
Sixty-Nine faction, made up largely of retailers
and merchants, met on July 4 for a bibulous
dinner, and among the many toasts was one to the
Destruction of the offspring of Babylon, the
Pope, the Cardinal, the Inquisition and the 69.
Pleasanter ballads than either satires or
‘‘mournful songs’’ were also current. The ballad
tradition was behind a long advertising jingle by
the town barber, Johnson; and Portland peddlers
less literary than Johnson nonetheless developed
street cries in rhyme. On Tuesdays and Fridays
one could hear old Joe Skinner, retired whaler,
pushing a barrow of fish and calling
Good morning, ladies all!
You have got money,
And I’ve got none
Come buy my fish,
And I’ll go home.
I’ll tell you a story,
That is true—
My fish they came
From the ocean blue.
If you want a fish for dinner
Come and buy of old Joe Skinner.
Or you might hear Stephen Cash, ‘‘profes-
sional clamist,’’ who often used, with the appro-
priate substitution of clams for fish, the same cry
as Skinner’s first one quoted above but who had
also developed a couplet of his own:
My clams are good physic, the season all
through—
A bushel come buy, and bid doctors adieu.
With verse of Skinner and Cash we are prob-
ably dealing both with traditional street cries
and original embellishments upon them.
Later in the period ballads reached the liter-
ary level; Seba Smith in 1830 wrote a ballad
about the exploits of Sam Patch in leaping over
the highest falls. This first appeared on JanuaryTheWreckoftheHesperus