About the author
Frank Moore was a journalist and Revolutionary historian. He published a number of books on the American Revolution during his career in the mid-19th century, including Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution, Diary of the American Revolution and The Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution.
This song must have been very popular with the loyalists, as four different editions were published in broadsides, during the two years following its first appearance, in the “Halifax Journal,” a short time subsequent to the evacuation of Boston.
Burrowing Yankees1
Ye Yankees who, mole-like, still throw up the earth,
And like them, to your follies are blind from your birth; Attempt not to hold British troops at defiance,
True Britons, with whom you pretend an alliance.
Mistake not; such blood ne’er run in your veins,
‘Tis no more than the dregs, the lees, or the drains:
Ye affect to talk big of your hourly attacks;
Come on ! and I’ll warrant, we’ll soon see your backs.
Such threats of bravadoes serve only to warm
The true British hearts, you ne’er can alarm;
The Lion once rous’d, will strike such a terror,
Shall show you, poor fools, your presumption and error.
And the time will soon come when your whole rebel race
Will be drove from the lands, nor dare show your face:
Here’s a health to great George, may he fully determine, To root from the earth all such insolent vermin.
- Burrowing Yankees. The newspapers, attached to the cause of the patriots, very generally republished this song as “a piece of tory gasconading.” Among those, the editor of the “Freeman’s Journal” reproduced it, congratulating his readers on having an opportunity to grace ” Poet’s Corner, with an incomparable production” from a tory paper, at the same time observing, that the genius who wrote it, “must have forgotten the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill.”
