William McCarty, comp. The American National Song Book. 1842.
Royal ConsultationsPhilip Freneau (17521832)
S
Let us do a mad action to make the world ring:
With Wellington’s army we now have the means
To make a bold stroke and exhibit new scenes.
To waste, and harass them with famine and fire;
My vengeance to carry through village and town,
And even to batter their capitol down.
Dear George, with yourself I am equally wroth:
Of Wellington’s army dispose as you please:
It is best, I presume, they should go beyond seas;
For, should they come home, I can easily show
The hangman will have too much duty to do.
Some mischief they did, when no army was near:
They came to correct, and they came to chastise,
And to do all the evil their heads could devise.
Till among the big houses they made a huge void;
Then back to their shipping they flew like the wind,
But left many more than five hundred behind
Of wounded and dead, and others say, double;
And thus was the hangman excused from some trouble.
Alexandria they plunder’d a night and a day;
Then quickly retreated, with moderate loss,
Their forces conducted by Cockburn and Ross.
But Baltimore drove them repeatedly back;
There Rodgers they saw, and their terror was such,
They saw they were damn’d when they saw him approach.
And the forts in disorder beheld them retreat,
So shatter’d and crippled, so mangled and sore,
That the tide of Patapsco was red with their gore.
In vain they manœuvred, in vain they paraded,
Their hundreds on hundreds were strew’d on the ground;
Each shot from the rifles brought death or a wound.
One shot from a buckskin completed their loss,
And their legions no longer were headed by Ross!
But home they would go, if their master was wise.
Such madness is seen in the waste of their force,
Such weakness and folly, with malice combined,
Such rancour, revenge, and derangement of mind,
That, all things consider’d, with truth we may say,
Both Cochrane and Cockburn are running away.
They are now on the way, they are now on the wing,
To tell them the story of loss and disaster,
One begging a pension, the other a plaster.
Let them speed as they may, to us it is plain
They will patch up their hulks for another campaign,
Their valour to prove, and their havoc to spread,
When Wellington’s army is missing or dead.